This interesting blog uses LINQ with FlickrNet objects which wrap up the Flickr API and gets back a photo collection based on tag , date and title. The blog gives a sample that gives a first hand practical use of LINQ and it's simplicity. The blog is titled as Bashmohandes. The blog gives a clear C# example of implementation of IQueryable interface.

 

FlickrNet is a project  on CodePlex .

One of the few questions that one would ask while upgrading from the older versions of .Net framework to the new 3.0 or 3.5 are what do these include ? Why should we or should not we upgrade?

 

The author in this blog summarizes the assemblies that come as part of the 3.0 as well as the 3.5 versions.  The fact that 3.0 and 3.5 both include the 2.0 assemblies explains the multi targetting support that comes with these new versions . It is important to understand what kind of runtime both 3.0 and 3.5 are - before we consider upgrading our applications to any one of these versions. It is undoubtedly a big bonus to be able to target the 2.0 version also with new 3.0 or 3.5 runtime. That's exactly what this blog explains , the composition of the new 3.0 and 3.5 runtime.

 

This article at CodeIdol goes in detail how to use the CreateUserWizard and the Membership API to implement registration of a user and sending either a HTML or Text email notification using MailDefinition template. The article is quite thorough in going through all the steps with code examples.

 

It goes through all the properties of the CreateUserWzard controls to set up their look and feel. It also discusses the Email feature in detail. One very interesting aspect of the article is it gives tips in between in a box which are useful. For Example:

 

"

Did you Know?

To add a text file or HTML page to your website, right-click on the project name in the Solution Explorer and choose the Add New Item menu option. In the Add New Item dialog box, you'll find Text file and HTML page file types.

 

"

In this article author Craig Shaw uses the Membership API, CreateWizard control and the MaiDefinition template to control the process of User activation after registration. The Membership API and controls offer a lot of basic functionality that can be reused and tailored very quickly to put together a reasonable and professional quality authentication and authorization mechanism.

 

The author gives clear code examples in C# to go from the beginning to end where a user is created and inactivated in the beginning. An email is triggered which sends a URL to activate the User. Then the User is activated after he clicks on the URL. All code examples for events and web configuration are listed clearly. The OnSendingMail event raised by CreateUserWizard is also discussed in detail.

 

This blog named as Thoughts.Generate() uses the MailDefinition template in ASP.Net 2.0 to send emails using other controls other than the CreateUserWizard control. The MailDefinition templates are typically used in Membership API where mails are sent after a user is registered or an email needs to be sent for password recovery in forgot password implementation. This feature of Membership did not get as much attention because it is mostly used in relation with the Membership related controls.

 

However in this blog the author takes this feature and creates a generic model associated with any other control that can trigger and send emails based on the configuration with this template.

 

Although this blog is a little old, however it discusses a very good feature of the framework that can be very well used even now; The MailDefinition tag looks like this:

 

 <MailDefinition
BodyFileName="~/Registrered.txt"
From="http://www.dotnettopics.com"
Subject="Thanks for registering with DotNetTopics">
</MailDefinition>

Code Smith has made a name for itself in the .Net community ; however there is also that portion of the developer community which still does not understand the importance of tools like this , how it can improve coding speed and efficiency. Most projects have the simple need for Objects that need to map against the relational database schema. This task can become very mechanical , mundane and arduous if you had a larger database. A tool like Code Smith can simplify this with a few clicks you can generate a custom object against a database table that generates properties that map to columns.

 

Code Smith also comes with the feature of templates that allows you to create VB Script templates that can customize the code generation. If you have VB / VB script background, it's a no brainer.  Otherwise the learning curve is very small.

 

It is also priced very reasonable: Standard Edition at : $99 and Professional Edition at $399. Within a few hours of using CodeSmith you can, recover the cost of buying the product.

 

The only downside is if you need to make modifications and additions to the generated code, you would have to do it yourself. However it definitely saves the time required to generate the initial repetitive code which can be a major cost saving in itself.

There are thousands of great blogs being written on the web, there is so much to learn from them. This blog is another one of those , the author titles the blog as Hacky Hacky . Here the author takes the example of HtmlAgilityPack, an open source CodePlex project for URL scraping and uses LINQ To XML syntax to scrape the URL, convert it to XML document and traverse through the document to find all the images on the URL.

 

A very nice blog to understand LINQ To XML syntax, and HtmlAgilityPack.

In this personal website of Jon Skeet he lists out all the new features of C# 3.0 language. The features that he summarises with examples are:

One more blog from Steven Nagy which is simple and well written with examples. Here he shows different ways how C# 2.0 and 3.0 syntax can used with Generics , Interfaces , Reference and Value types. The 7 different cases show different scenarios how the Type that the Generic object represents can be inherited from an Interface Or / And be a Reference , Value type. The Value type in this case is the struct Type. More often we end up using the built in Generic collection or objects from the framework like List<T> . If we had to build our own reusable Generic object, this blog covers some basic concepts .

 

The author takes a simple example of base Monkey type and different breeds of monkeys as sub types. The Generic type here actually would be the Monkey where as a Chimp would be strongly typed representation of the Generic type.

This is a 4 part blog by Steven Nagy:

 

Notification Services - Part 1 - Technology Overview
Notification Services - Part 2 - Example Overview and Instance XML
Notification Services - Part 3 - Application XML
Notification Services - Part 4 - Managed API

 

Part 1 gives an overview of Notification Services. This part explains the different aspects of Notification Services.

 

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This blog is written by Vishal Joshi , who is a Program Manager at Microsoft.

 

One of the goals of ASP.Net MVC framework is to support Test Driven Development a.k.a TDD .  MVC Framework provides a mechanism to write ASP.Net applications that are modular and scalable . The current ASP.Net model is provenly successful , however does not enforce writing a modular application that incorporates what is called as 'seperation of concerns' . The MVC Framework is modeled in such a way that the application developer is forced to write an N tier application , without having to make a concentrated effort towards it. This is very important for large scale enterprise applications. In that direction the ASP.Net MVC framework supports TDD , which again is a Agile way of doing software development and can speed up efficiency of testing a N tier application.

 

Vishal Joshi in this blog creates a Test Framework using Visual Studio 2008 , RhinoMock and NUnit. He enlists a series of steps how to create a Test Framework for a MVC application using third party Testing tools.