Steve Smith, software craftsman
My new book, the ASP.NET Developer’s Cookbook, is now available. I just checked Amazon and it’s still just accepting pre-orders, but I know it’s done because I have a copy in my hands! This book was written as a combined effort between myself, Rob Howard of the ASP.NET Team, and about 20 columnists from ASPAlliance.com. It contains […]
I completed my Regular Expression Cheat sheet a couple of days ago, so that I can hand it out this week at my session on regular expressions at ASP.NET Connections in New Orleans. It’s intended to be printable (thus it’s not a complete reference – only the simple beginner stuff that fits on one page), […]
I gave my second presentation to a user group for INETA this evening (well, last evening – it’s late). I spoke to about 70 members of the Philadelphia .NET user group, Philly .NET, about ASP.NET Performance Tips and Tricks and the Caching support in ASP.NET. While I was discussing callbacks and the CacheItemRemovedCallback delegate that […]
Eric Gunnerson at Microsoft has published an article on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (he calls it Test First Development). It does a good job of introdcuing the concept of TDD and showing how to use NUnit to perform unit testing of a class before and during its construction. Another good resource I’ve found […]
I set up Win2K3 Server on a box at home a few days ago and here are some of the things I’ve learned. The first thing I’d like to point out is that there is a pretty good Unofficial FAQ maintained by Windows XP MVP Larry Samuels. The machine I installed on is a Dell […]
I just responded to a discussion on this topic on the ASP.NET Forums… There is a good article on the actual performance characteristics of DataReaders vs. DataSets on MSDN here. In it, you will find that DataSets are not always slower than DataReaders, especially when there is any significant latency between the web server and […]
Well, I’m out in San Francisco this week to teach ASP.NET with C# to half a dozen students, and that’s going quite well. I had the opportunity to see Alan Shalloway speak at the Bay Area User Group on Tuesday night, and met up with ASPAlliance columnist Steve Sharrock there for the first time as […]
I’m really getting more and more into unit testing and testing frameworks. At the moment I’m using NUnit 2.0 for my test purposes as I redesign ASPAlliance.com‘s content management system for integration into the Microsoft Codewise Community standard specification for Federated Search. I’m working with a friend and fellow columnist, Jonathan Cogley, who suggested a […]
Microsoft has a Team Development Build Tool called BuildIt which you can download here. From their site: “BuildIt.NET is designed to jump-start the build process used for development of .NET distributed applications. This download provides full source code and comprehensive documentation for the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool and Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET development system.”
The ASP.NET Cookbook is finally 100% complete and submitted to the publisher, SAMS (as of 2/26/03). This has been quite an undertaking, and having completed the longest and hardest phase of the book writing process (author review remains, but is not nearly as arduous), I must once again say that I never want to write […]