Archives

• Books

  Jul 26 2010 6:21 AM

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  Sadukie tagged me with her books post a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to respond with a post of my own.  I have a post I update periodically that includes some of my most recommended developer books (where I’ve been meaning to add Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert and Micah Martin) – if you’re looking for ways to improve yourself as a software developer I would start there. Currently Reading Right now I’m reading Disclosure, by Michael Crichton.  I’m a fan of his stuff, and in the last year I also read Next, State of Fear, and A Case of Need.  I’ve also been reading a lot of James Rollins novels (which Michelle got me started on), which … more

• Working with Application Pool Identities

  Jul 8 2010 1:16 PM

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  There a new feature of IIS called Application Pool Identities that was apparently introduced with SP2 of Windows Server 2008.  There’s a nice overview of Application Pool Identities here, which is the basis for this post, which is just my notes on the feature. If you’re setting up new web sites and application pools in IIS on Windows Server 2008, it’s likely they’ll default to ApplicationPoolIdentity, like this: This is all well and good, and for the most part you don’t need to care about how this works behind the scenes or why it’s different than the other bazillion different esoteric accounts you’ve had to know about over the last 10 years when setting up IIS for ASP.NET … more

• Software Engineering 101 in Cleveland

  Jul 7 2010 11:34 AM

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  Next week I’ll be one of several speakers at a free one-day event being held at the Microsoft office in Independence, Ohio.  The event is designed for Microsoft developers who are seeking to improve their skills in software engineering, including object-oriented design, design patterns, and automated testing.  The event is being hosted by Microsoft and organized by the Hudson Software Craftsmanship group and NimblePros consulting services. Initially there were 50 slots available – I think there are about 15-20 left as of today.  The event is scheduled for 16 July 2010 from 830am to 4pm, so if you can get approval to come for some free hands-on training, sign up fast before … more

• Set Up Build Agents By Project in TeamCity

  Jul 6 2010 1:22 PM

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  We’re using TeamCity to manage our continous integration builds for CodeProject.com and LakeQuincy.com.  Before TeamCity, I was using CruiseControl.net, and TeamCity is much easier to get working (and requires far less XML manipulation).  I do miss CCTray, which I found to be much nicer than the TeamCity tray notifier (which if you click on it never shows anything immediately – it has to go and get it which imposes a delay – it also doesn’t do sounds like CCTray does – but I digress). Let’s say you have several large projects and you want them to run on the same instance of TeamCity.  Let’s further assume that some of these build configurations do a lot of stuff, and thus … more

• How Can I Determine The Current Controller or Action in an Html Helper

  Jul 2 2010 10:42 AM

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  If you’re writing an HTML Helper for ASP.NET MVC you may want to do something different based on whether the page that is to be rendered was arrived at via a particular controller or controller action.  I found the following code which does just this in one of the ASP.NET MVC Themes available from the www.asp.net web site (the Dark theme, I believe it’s called). Note that I’ve already modified this code to work with the new ASP.NET 4 string encoding and the MvcHtmlString type, as I wrote about previously. public static MvcHtmlString LoginLink(this HtmlHelper helper) { string currentControllerName = … more