Steven Smith, Microsoft Regional Director

Bug Solution to System.Core in VS2010 Projects

Steven Smith — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:22:16 GMT

Steven Smith writes "...I just ran into an odd issue with a VS2010 project. In my case it was an MVC 2 application I was upgrading from VS2008. One of the built-in controllers (ProfileController) was failing to compile because it could not resolve the Linq extension method symbols Single() and Matches(). These are located in the System.Core assembly. I checked my project references in Solution Explorer, and..." Read post »

Code Analysis Techniques

Steven Smith — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:11:23 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | TechTalk

Steven Smith writes "...The perspective of an outside authority can often uncover design decisions that represent “low hanging fruit” and can quickly and easily be adjusted to produce a much better solution. Sometimes the hard part really is just knowing where the problem is – after that fixing it is easy. That reminds me of a story I heard somewhere a long time ago, that I’ll wrap up with:..." Read post »

Example Using Code Contracts in VS2010

Steven Smith — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:49:26 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | Visual Studio

Steven Smith writes "...With the Code Contracts installed, you can start to use them in your code in place of things like guard clauses to ensure that a parameter is not null. The benefit of this approach is that you get a richer experience at design/development time and you can also ensure, via compilation errors, that certain things simply cannot occur in your application. Code Contracts uses..." Read post »

Code Sample Determines the Current Controller or Action in an Html Helper

Steven Smith — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:05:54 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | ASPNET

Steven Smith writes "...the HtmlHelper has a ViewContext property, which allows you to access RouteData and ultimately from there determine the controller and/or action that was used for this request. Incidentally, you can also use the ViewContext to get to..." Read post »

Budding Versus Festering Code

Steven Smith — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:00:17 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | TechTalk

Steven Smith writes "...there is a trend in the tooling to make the cost of budding less - it would be interesting to add something to the IDE that would make the cost of festering INCREASE. Imagine an add-in that would grow more and more annoying as the size of your class increased. Clippy pops up and..." Read post »

Default Encoding of Strings in ASP.NET MVC 2

Steven Smith — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:35:25 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | NET Framework

Steven Smith writes "...Encoding by default is a good thing. With ASP.NET 4 this is very easy to do if you just enforce the rules that <%= is no longer used, and is replaced everywhere with <%:. This may result in some breaking changes from existing code that is expecting to render plain strings that contain HTML in them. These can easily be fixed through..." Read post »

Great Uses of Using Statement in C#

Steven Smith — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:39:47 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | NET Framework

Steven Smith writes "...Consider the scenario where you want to perform some kind of pre- and post- processing around an arbitrary block of code. The simplest scenario I know of is when you want to time some code, using the stopwatch class. If you want to perform basic stopwatch usage, you can write some code like this..." Read post »

How to Move a Certificate Between Web Servers

Steven Smith — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:59:53 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | Security

Steven Smith writes "...uses SSL to secure users’ data, I had to move the certificate to the new server as part of the server move. Fortunately, this process is quite painless. First, you need to export the certificate to a .pfx file and give it a password, using these steps:.." Read post »

Testing Email Sending

Steven Smith — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:45:08 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | TechTalk

Steven Smith writes "...if you’re a developer and you want to easily be able to test whether or not emails are working correctly in your application without actually sending them and/or installing a real SMTP server on your machine, pay attention....The other interesting tidbit about emails that is specific to .NET is that the MailMessage class is IDisposable. I never realized that before, but I noticed..." Read post »

TechEd 2010 on the Runway

Steven Smith — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:34:46 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | Editors Picks

Steven Smith writes "...hear about what NOT to do on your software project. Hear my own and others’ war stories and lessons learned. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll realize you’re a much better developer than a lot of folks out there. Here’s the official...Cheap beer and lousy pizza...a night of gumbo...Mardi Gras World...the joie de vivre..." Read post »

Clean Up - Don't Through Duplication Exceptions

Steven Smith — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:48:51 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | TechTalk

Steven Smith writes "...If you find yourself literally throwing the exact exception in more than one location within a given method, stop....Note that in this last example, I’m throwing the same exception type in each case, but with different Message values. I’m also making sure..." Read post »

Solution to NameValueSectionHandler Error

Steven Smith — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:34:42 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | NET Framework

Steven Smith writes "...The issue in this case is that the NameValueSectionHandler is still in the System assembly, but is in the System.Configuration namespace. This causes confusion which can be alleviated by using the following section definition:..." Read post »

Avoid appSettings if You Can, Here's Why

Steven Smith — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:05:41 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | Editors Picks

Steven Smith writes "...For my ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk, I use the following example, which is a simple DemoSettings class that includes two fields. The first is an integer representing how many attendees there are present for the talk, and the second is the title of the talk. The setup in web.config is as follows:..." Read post »

It's Easy to Share Folders in VirtualBox on Windows 7

Steven Smith — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:07:22 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | Microsoft Windows Client

Steven Smith writes "...how to share folders between my host OS (Windows 7) and my virtual OS (Windows Server 2008)...Where are Shared Folders in a VirtualBox VM? Fortunately a bit of searching...It turns out that there is a magic word you have to know, and that is..." Read post »

How to Detect Unicode Usage in SQL Column

Steven Smith — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:17:42 GMT

Steven Smith's blog | SQL Server

Steven Smith writes "...Converting data types from Unicode (nvarchar/nchar) can cut the size required to store the data by half, which can be a fairly easy optimization to make. However, this will usually only make a significant difference for tables with..." Read post »