Microsoft All-in-One Code Framework

1/14/2011 8:27:56 PM Development Tony Comments

 I love looking through code snippets - especially when smart people wrote them.  I end up learning a lot even if it's not relevant to a project I'm currently working on.

Microsoft has set up a repository of code snippets that you can look through.  Ever wonder how to programmatically  monitor the registry?  There's a snippet for that.  Want to send an SMTP message?  You guessed it -

You can even submit requests for snippets you'd like to see and if Microsoft thinks they would be helpful to the community the'll code up a new snippet at no cost.

The list of snippets is here

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Open XML SDK Resources

1/10/2011 1:06:28 PM Development Tony Comments

I've been working with the Open XML SDK for the past few weeks.  I'm not going to lie to you, it's a pain in the butt sometimes but once you start to understand the structure of these documents and start building beautiful documents you'll be glad you spent the time.

Here are a couple of great resources:

Open XML SDK Downloads -  The Microsoft page with the sdk.  Take note!  The OpenXMLSDKv2.msi file is all you need to start working with Open XML docs in visual studio, but the OpenXMLSDKTool.msi contains the "productivity tool" which is so very necessary to building your understanding of the SDK.  It can look at a document and reverse engineer it to code, and can even compare two documents and give you the "diff" code to change one to the other.  This is great for figuring out what exact commands to use to do something.  Here is a link to a youtube that shows how to use the tool.

Code Snippet Library - A list of 52 code snippets that will help you do typical functions like get the worksheet of a spreadsheet by name and get a cell by address (as in A2)

I'm writing up a dll with typical functions like creating a spreadsheet from a datatable which i hope to post soon. 

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Video Training - Get your learn on

7/7/2010 8:31:01 AM General Tony Comments

You have to keep growing in the technical consulting business.  I'm constantly reading books but sometimes I get burnt out on reading.  Sometimes I like to hook up the laptop to the TV and watch some video training. I use a couple different web sites for video training.  I think I've posted on VTC before but that was probably a while ago, so here we go -

VTC - Virtual Training Course
VTC has a huge library of topics on just about everything you can imagine.  You can learn everything from Photoshop to SQL server.  It's $30/month and worth every penny.
http://www.vtc.com

LearnDevNow -
The focus of LearnDevNow if Microsoft development and it's amazingly robust.  The videos are very professional, if a little dry.  I highly recommend them.  It's $99 for a year of access.
http://www.learndevnow.com

 

 

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I'm Back

11/30/2009 9:17:12 AM General Tony Comments

I had to reformat my server several months ago.  I took a meticulous backup (or so I thought) but realized I did not take a backup of my blog.  Consequently I lost all of my blogs from this year. 

Today I was cleaning out my hard drive and found a backup from June.  Ok, good enough.  I'm back! 

As of today I'm going to try to start posting regularly again.

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Async web services the easy way

3/6/2009 4:50:58 PM Development Tony Comments

Source:Begin/End Async WebService Proxy Methods

Have you ever needed to kick off a long running process through a web service and immediately return control of the page to the user?  I have a process which takes about 10 minutes to run and I don't want to just set the page timeout really really high and make the user sit there and watch IE grind.  With the tweak to the project file described below, web service "begin" and "end" methods will be generated for the web service when you add it as a web reference to your project.  If you had a HelloWorld() method you would now have access to a "BeginHelloWorld()" method which can fire off the web service and NOT wait for it to complete before returning control to the user.

You can add WebReference_EnableLegacyEventingModel with a value of true to the first ProptertyGroup section in your csproj file.  You will have to close visual studio before doing that and update your web references to generate the updated class with the begin/end methods.

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