I wanted to show our company's blog feed on our intranet first page. There some empty space I wanted to fill somehow. I found a good solution, so there was no need for some third-party Web Parts. Also there was no need to write any additional code.

Extensions method introduced with C# 3.0 make it possible to “extend” existing classes with new methods without access to source code of those classes. This blog post is deeper technical introduction to extension methods for those who are making decisions about software design and architecture.

Automatic properties are supported by C# since version 3.0 and as developers we use them almost every day. Sometimes developers have questions about how automatic properties work and how to effectively use them. Also I bust some myths about automatic properties and go deep with internals.

In this example we will use simple color recalculation method to grayscale images. For each pixel on image we will calculate "average color" that we write back on image. Average color is sum of current color's red, green and blue channels integer value divided by three. This value is assigned to all three channels for current pixel.

At the end of the previous month I wrote a posting on DefensiveDatasource class that can be used to associate ASP.NET's GridView with collections containing objects of different types and based on one and the same base class. Dividing data into pages in GridView does, however, not succeed. An error message "The data source does not support server-side data paging" is displayed.

I had a problem when trying to filter WSS 3.0 calendar list by Start Time column. This column doesn't appear in filtered columns list somewhy. I found solution that smells like dirty hack to me, but at least it solved my problem.

We recently implemented some changes in the software development methodology used at our company and quite by chance encountered an interesting .Net 2.0 problem. Namely, when an object array inherited from the same base class is cast on a base class and submitted to the data binder, the latter gets confused. The array contained objects from different classes but all these classes had one and the same base class.

Some time ago I had to clone objects and .Net's shallow copy proved to be insufficient – it was necessary to use deep copy. No good tools are provided by .Net itself. If required, the object to be cloned must conform to the ICloneable interface and the Clone() method can be defined for the object. As the classes were not very numerous, but relatively bulky and complicated, there was no point in writing a Clone() method for all of them. I needed something else.

My current project required a way for exporting data to Excel. I could of course write a separate export method for every data set but in my opinion it would be a pointless waste of time. I would also like to utilise the existing functionality as much as possible – as it is, the lists going to Excel are displayed to the user in the browser.