Reverse Alchemy

Today I passed the 70-536 TS: Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation exam. I’m happier about this one than I was about the Web-Based Client exam since I barely had time to study due to illness. So, this completes my MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications and gets me yet another step closer to my MCPD: [...]

I use Virtual PC for my desktop virtualisation needs. I love how virtualisation works. I have a set of base images I use to quickly set up any development environment, anywhere (provided the host pc has enough memory, which is pretty much a non-requirement these days).
Today I was getting settled down to do some SharePoint development. [...]

Recently I’ve been exploring the possibilities of MSBuild in my projects. MSBuild is a command-line tool so this involved spending a lot of time at the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt. And having to change directories every time I started a new instance really started getting on my nerves. So, Google to the rescue!
I found [...]

There is an -imho-  disturbing tendency amongst developers when it comes to applying coding and style standards, unit testing, duplication analysis and the like. The typical mindset seems to be “if my colleagues don’t do it, I won’t, either”. I know, I’ve been there as well. In fact, I am still there. But if you [...]

Sometimes you discover a little gem that you just know you will be using over and over again. My latest discovery is implicit type conversion. Implicit type conversion basically allows you to convert any object to any other type. Note that not all conversions make sense.
As an example, let’s assume the following Field and FieldList [...]

Today I passed the 70-528 TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Web-Based Client Development exam. One more step towards my MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer certification

Recently I’ve been working a lot with the SharePoint standard templates. A client wanted us to build a Web Part that had the look and feel of a standard SharePoint Web Part and the easiest way to achieve that was using templates. Using these, we didn’t have to worry about custom fields, save buttons, validation [...]

In his excellent post on How SharePoint 2007 Renders Its Content Geoff McElhanon shows how to programmatically load SharePoint-based templates. The code he shows us is as follows:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
// Initialize template container with our custom template
templateContainer = new TemplateContainer();
templateContainer.Template =
SPControlTemplateManager.GetTemplateByName(RenderingTemplateId);
 
// Add the container to the webpart control hierarchy
Controls.Add(templateContainer);

However, I ran into [...]

I have been advertising Ruby and IronRuby at my company for a while now — or trying too. We are a .NET solution provider and sofar they’re not convinced that Ruby will be worth the effort of learning. Oh well. One of these days I will come up with the decisive argument.
Thinking of that, maybe [...]

I ran into a situation a while ago that I needed to retrieve a serialized object from the database, copy its properties to another object and send that object over the wire. Why the copying? The object stored in the database were written in .NET 2.0, whereas the service I was sending the object to [...]