outcoldman - Developer IT

Meet IntelliCommand (Visual Studio 2010/2012 extension)

- by outcoldman

How many shortcut keys you know in Visual Studio? Do you want to know all of them? I know how you can learn them very easy. I'd like to introduce you a cool extension for Visual Studio 2010/2012 which I wrote with help of my colleagues Drake Campbell and Aditya Mandaleeka. Let me just copy-paste description from Visual Studio Gallery: IntelliCommand - an extension for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 which helps to find the short keys. It shows the help windows with all possible combinations when you press Ctrl or Shift or Alt or their combinations (hold it for about 2 seconds to see this window). Also it shows the list of possible combination when you press first combination of chord shortcut keys, like Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C (this combination comments selected text in editor). Read more... (on outcoldman.com)

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Regular Expressions. Remember it, write it, test it.

- by outcoldman

I should say that I’m fan of regular expressions. Whenever I see the problem, which I can solve with Regex, I felt a burning desire to do it and going to write new test for new regex. Previously I had installed SharpDevelop Studio just for good regular expression tool in it (Why VS doesn’t have one?). But now I’m a little wiser, and for each Regex I write a separate test. I find it difficult to remember the syntax of regular expressions (I don’t write them very often); I always forget which character is responsible for the beginning of the line, etc. So I use external small and easy articles like this “Regular expressions - An introduction”. Now I want to show you little samples of regular expressions and want to show you how to test these samples. Read more... (redirect to http://outcoldman.ru)

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Method extension for safely type convert

- by outcoldman

Recently I read good Russian post with many interesting extensions methods after then I remembered that I too have one good extension method “Safely type convert”. Idea of this method I got at last job. We often write code like this: int intValue; if (obj == null || !int.TryParse(obj.ToString(), out intValue)) intValue = 0; This is method how to safely parse object to int. Of course will be good if we will create some unify method for safely casting. I found that better way is to create extension methods and use them then follows: int i; i = "1".To<int>(); // i == 1 i = "1a".To<int>(); // i == 0 (default value of int) i = "1a".To(10); // i == 10 (set as default value 10) i = "1".To(10); // i == 1 // ********** Nullable sample ************** int? j; j = "1".To<int?>(); // j == 1 j = "1a".To<int?>(); // j == null j = "1a".To<int?>(10); // j == 10 j = "1".To<int?>(10); // j == 1 Read more... (redirect to http://outcoldman.ru)

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Developing web application with time zones support

- by outcoldman

When you develop web application you should know that client PCs can be located anywhere on earth. Even if you develop app just for your country users you should remember it (in Russia now we have 9 time zones, before 28 of March we had 11 time zones). On big sites with many members do it very easy – you can place field “time zone” in member profile, in Sharepoint I saw this solution, and many enterprise app do it like this. But if we have simple website with blog publications or website with news and we don’t have member profiles on server, how we can support user’s time zones? I thought about this question because I wanted to develop time zone support on my own site. My case is ASP.NET MVC app and MS SQL Server DB. First, I started from learning which params we have at HTTP headers, but it doesn’t have information about it. So we can’t use regional settings and methods DateTime.ToLocalTime and DateTime.ToUniversalTime until we get user time zone on server. If we used our app before without time zones support we need to change dates from local time zone to UTC time zone (something like Greenwich Mean Time). Read more...(Redirect to http://outcoldman.ru)

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The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET

- by outcoldman

First time when I familiarized with unit testing was 5 or 6 years ago. It was start of my developing career. I remember that somebody told me about code coverage. At that time I didn’t write any Unit tests. Guy, who was my team lead, told me “Do you see operator if with three conditions? You should check all of these conditions”. So, after that I had written some code, I should go to interface and try to invoke all code which I wrote from user interface. Nice? At current time I know little more about tests and unit testing. I have not participated in projects, designed by Test Driven Development (TDD). Basics of my knowledge are a spying code of my colleagues, some articles and screencasts. I had decide that I should know much more, and became a real professional of unit testing, this is why I had start to read book The art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET. More than, in my current job place looks like I’m just one who writing unit tests for my code. I should show good examples of my tests. ,a href="http://outcoldman.ru/en/blog/show/267"Read more...

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Export data to Excel from Silverlight/WPF DataGrid

- by outcoldman

Data export from DataGrid to Excel is very common task, and it can be solved with different ways, and chosen way depend on kind of app which you are design. If you are developing app for enterprise, and it will be installed on several computes, then you can to advance a claim (system requirements) with which your app will be work for client. Or customer will advance system requirements on which your app should work. In this case you can use COM for export (use infrastructure of Excel or OpenOffice). This approach will give you much more flexibility and give you possibility to use all features of Excel app. About this approach I’ll speak below. Other way – your app is for personal use, it can be installed on any home computer, in this case it is not good to ask user to install MS Office or OpenOffice just for using your app. In this way you can use foreign tools for export, or export to xml/html format which MS Office can read (this approach used by JIRA). But in this case will be more difficult to satisfy user tasks, like create document with landscape rotation and with defined fields for printing. At this article I'll show you how to work with Excel object from .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 with dynamic objects and give you an approach which allow you to export data from DataGrid Silverlight and WPF controls. Read more...

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Windows Keys Extender – tool for XP/Vista users to using hotkeys Win+[Left|Right|Up|Down]

- by outcoldman

In Windows 7, I really liked an opportunity to change the position of the windows by pressing hotkeys Win + (Left | Right | Up | Bottom): Win + Left - window attached to the left side Win + Right - window attached to the right side Win + Up - window is maximized Win + Bottom - window in the normal state I’m talking about this: This is really useful hotkeys and really comfortable work with windows. But not all can use Windows 7 right now. When Windows7 was in beta and RC states I really wanted to use this features right now in current Windows version (I had Vista). So I spent my time and wrote this tool. In addition, the tool has functional which can change position of windows (It is useful for laptops, you can move windows with hotkeys). And of course this tool can move windows between monitors. Hot keys can be customized. Interface in English. Now I don’t want to add new functionality, because now I’m using Windows 7 with all functions that this tool have. I wrote this tool on C# with .NET 3.5. You can use this source code for knowing how to work with hotkeys with C#. At first I placed source code on Google Code and then placed it on CodePlex too. So you can download it from one of them. I would be glad if someone will use it. :)

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C# 4.0 in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

- by outcoldman

Just became a lucky owner of this book C# IN A NUTSHELL 4th edition. This is a fourth edition of this book’s series. I saw previous third edition of this book, we presented it on one of our events at Yaroslavl State University, but that book was a Russian translated version and published in Russia, this is was bad side of that book – all books at Russia printed on really bad paper. I should say that I didn’t read this book by end, but already I was surprised. Why? Why I heard a lot about Richter CLR via C# (English version of 3rd edition of this book I already have, and this book are waiting my attention), and just a few words about C# IN A NUTSHELL, at least in my sphere. I just listen once about this book at one of the podcast of Alt.Net group, and this words was Richter it is really good book, and C# IN A NUTSHELL it is a good handbook. My opinion is - you should read Richter if you want to develop with .NET. But if you want to develop on .NET with C# you should read C# IN A NUTSHELL too. Read more...

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