.NET

Adding search capabilities to applications is something that users often ask. Sometimes it is not enough to have just filters on lists. Instead of going with mainstream and write complex SQL queries we can be smarter and use specialized indexing and search solutions that perform way better than custom large SQL queries that I consider as anti-pattern for searching something. In this posting I will introduce you Lucene.NET indexing and search engine and show you how to use it in your applications.

I am evaluating hosted Jira Studio and it likes me more and more when I’m using it. As hosted service is not in our premises and contains important information about our work I was asked to find out if there’s a way how to read data from Jira Studio and save it to our local data store. In this posting I will show you a simple way how to read issues from Jira Studio and save them to database.

Often asked question: is there any way to gather debug output of .NET program that is running on environment where Visual Studio is not installed? Yes, you can do it and you can do it for free with program called DebugView. Here’s how it works.

Today I got e-mail from JetBrains stating that there is dotPeek early build available for download. dotPeek is .NET assemblies decompiler that is offered for free and that should replace .NET Reflector (not free anymore). dotPeek will also be part of ReSharper 6. In this posting I will give you brief introduction about dotPeek.

Here’s one little method I use to write out debug information when investigating some new (legacy but new to me) system. Usually I remove this method later when I know how code works. It’s maybe not the best way to debug things but it works like charm in many situations.

Pex and Moles is new testing and code analysis technology that is created by Microsoft Research. Pex is powerful tool that helps you analyze your code, detect error situations and generate parameterized unit tests. In this posting I will give you quick and illustrated overview of Pex. (more…)

I needed a quick’n’dirty way to inspect objects returned from external source. I wrote simple object properties dumping mechanism you can use to investigate unknown objects. It is really quick and really dirty.

During PDC10 Anders Hejlsberg announced Visual Studio Async CTP when speaking about new stuff in C# and VB.NET next versions. In this posting I will introduce the background of Visual Studio Async and I will provide you with links to different resources so you can get started immediately.

Sometimes we need publisher/subscriber messaging in our applications to broadcast messages to different parts of system in real time. We can always build our own solution for this but we can also use something that is already there. In this posting I will show you how to use MemBus to send messages from MDI parent form to MDI child forms. (more…)

I am making some experiments with large database and different O/R-mappers. To make it easier for me to measure the time that code takes to run I wrote simple command class that uses Stopwatch class and measures how long it takes for action to run. I this posting I will show you my class and explain how to use it.