If you’re like me, you know little to nothing about the System.ComponentModel namespace in the .NET Framework base class library. Well, now you can learn what it’s all about, thanks to Brian Pepin’s entry on the subject. He covers the functionality provided by the namespace, and the basics of using it. It looks like the ComponentModel namespace really is very useful, once you know what it’s all about. Read more »

If you are a keyboard fiend (I know that I am), you prefer to use the keyboard over the mouse whenever possible. While Windows does have a keyboard equivalent for nearly everything in its UI, there are some keyboard shortcuts that are hard to find, or just aren’t really known about at all. Enter the Microsoft Keyboard Assistance page. It lists the keyboard shortcuts for Windows, IE, Office, and other Microsoft apps. On a semi-related note, if you want to open up your My Documents folder in a hurry, open up the Run dialog (Windows Key + R), type in “my documents”, and press enter (via Kevin Dente). It can’t Read more »

This article is a great introduction to building .NET assemblies with strong names. I’ve always known that it’s a good idea to create a strong name for the assemblies that I create, and it makes things “better” if I do so, but it wasn’t ever really explained (that I saw, anyway) why this was such a good idea. That is no longer the case – this article goes into great detail why you should strong name assemblies, the different options you have for doing so, and the pros and cons of each. It’s definitely a great read. Read more »

For those of you using the Visual Studio 2005 CTP, the Visual Studio 2005 looks like a must read. While it has just been created, the entries that have already been posted are a great way to get started using the new features in VS2005. Via Duncan Mackenzie. Read more »

Regulator 2.0, currently in Beta, allows you to verify the regular expressions that you write work as expected. I know that there have been many times that I wanted to make sure that the regular expression that I was putting together was actually going to match what I thought it would, but I had no way to test this except for just running my app. Now, I could just run it through Regulator and make sure that I’ve written in correctly. Note that Regulator 2.0 requires the .NET Framework v1.0, which can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site. Via Dan Crevier. Read more »

It’s about time! MSDN Subscriber Downloads now provides an RSS feed containing all of the latest items posted for downloads. Very sweet – now I don’t need to periodically check it for new apps, or wait until the monthly “what’s new” e-mail arrives. Via Jim Blizzard. Read more »

For as long as I’ve used NewsGator, I’ve been able to right click an RSS feed from within IE and subscribe to it. This, however, doesn’t do me much good, since my primary browser is Firefox. Thankfully, Firefox users get this functionality now, too. Whenever you right click an RSS feed link in Firefox, this extension will add a “Subscribe in NewsGator” item to the context menu. Now that is sweet – I have even less of a reason to fire up IE now! Read more »

Rick Spencer’s post on how developers use the debugger is very enlightening. I didn’t even realize how I use the debugger, but when he talks about things that developers typically do, all I could do was find myself agreeing with him. I haven’t used the debugger in Visual Studio 2005 yet, but it sounds like it’s a substantial improvement over the current one. It looks like a lot of this is thanks to people like Rick performing usability studies. He’s a great read, talking about all of the ways that the team is improving the IDE to help increase developer productivity. Read more »

CodeSmith is a code generation tool. You create templates that specify the code to generate, and add properties (such as class name, namespace, etc.) to the template to further customize the output. It gets even better – you can even use most the functionality of the .NET base class library as well. For ASP.NET developers, the template syntax is apparently very similar to this, so it shouldn’t be hard to pick up at all (I don’t know ASP.NET, and I didn’t have any problems). The CodeSmith UI is also very similar to Visual Studio, as well. While CodeSmith is freeware, there is a professional version. The only differences between the Read more »

Even though it’s still a ways off, WinFS (Longhorn’s storage model) is looking really sweet. While there have been some articles on it at MSDN providing basic information about it, I found myself wanting to know more – all that it can do, how it works, how I as a developer can use it, etc. Thankfully, this article does a great job of providing an in-depth look at how WinFS does what it does, and how developer will be able to use it. Via Chris Sells. Read more »