James Newton-King on Json.NET
Our CodePlex Project of the Month for March 2009 is Json.NET.
"The Json.NET library makes working with JSON formatted data in .NET simple. Quickly read and write JSON using the JsonReader and JsonWriter or serialize your .NET objects with a single method call using the JsonSerializer."
The Json.NET project was started by James Newton-King. Listen to our interview with James using the embedded audio player or download the MP3.
—–
CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community. Learn More
Banking with XML
By Peter Jones
Remember XML? Remember those fun times you had creating XML data files, XSL’s and DTD’s using Notepad? It seemed like such a great thing to do. There were grandiose plans to save the world with markup.
Today, XML is just another file format thanks to great tools and (reasonably well followed) standards. The tools in Visual Studio do such a great job of encapsulating XML that we often forget that it even exists under the covers.
And then along comes a scenario where you need to dig deep and reach for those reference manuals (or search engine). Recently I had just such a challenge.
Beyond VB and C#
by Ted Neward
Within the .NET community, a low-grade battle rages between two groups, those who use Visual Basic and those who use C#, and never has the world of Computer Science seen a more virulent and angry battle… except maybe for those who argue where the curly-braces should go in C++ and C# code. Not that there’s really anything to argue about, anyway; as any right-thinking C# developer knows, they go on the next line. But that’s not the point of this article, so we’ll move on.
(Besides, I’m right, anyway.)
The problem, of course, is that a viewpoint that limits itself to just those two languages misses out on a much larger world, one which contains a much larger set of tools than just those two languages. And while those two languages, like other object-oriented languages before them, are each genuinely useful languages, the unfortunate fact of each is that they are, at heart, just object-oriented languages. And while that may hardly seem to be a limiting factor, considering how much we’ve been able to accomplish with those languages to date, much of that viewpoint stems from the fact that most .NET developers have never seen anything else.
You know the old saying: When all you have is a hammer….
C# Features You Should Be Using
by Ted Neward
When Microsoft first introduced C# to the masses in 2000, it was, in many respects, a language that anyone who’d ever worked with Java or C++ could pick up, learn, and be a productive developer after only a few hours of study. Granted, there were a few subtleties that took a bit of getting used to, like events, but on the whole, the C# language emerged as a pretty close descendant of its predecessors.
But as C# developed, first in the 2.0 release and then in the 3.0 release, the language took a sharp turn from its ancestral legacy into some strange territory by comparison — first with enumerators in 2.0, then lambda expressions in 3.0 — and a number of .NET developers found themselves longing for "the good old days" of C#, worrying that the language was too complicated and painful to use now. Granted, the LINQ features of C# were widely and warmly received, but some of the underlying features that made LINQ possible were barely understood, and to this day, rarely used outside of LINQ.
It’s time to put that trend where it belongs — out to pasture. Let’s take a look at the top 6 features of C# that you should be using if you’re not already. And while we’re at it, let’s see if we can spare your fingers some trauma, by reducing the number of keystrokes required to get something done.
Tamir Khason on Vista Battery Saver
Our CodePlex Project of the Month for January 2009 is Vista Battery Saver.
"This tiny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features."
When you switch from running on AC power to running on battery, Vista Battery Saver will disable the Windows Sidebar and Aero features and switch to a more conservative power plan (e.g., from High Performance to Power Saver). When you reconnect to AC power, Vista Battery Saver switches everything back to the full Vista experience.
The Vista Battery Saver project was started by Tamir Khason. Listen to our interview with Tamir using the embedded audio player or download the MP3.
—–
CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community. Learn More
Donald Belcham on Brownfield Development
In this audio interview, Donald Belcham discusses brownfield development, technical debt, and some useful tools for developers.
Be sure to read Donald’s article “Working with Brownfield Code“.
Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets
by Brian Noyes
One of the most underutilized productivity features in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 is Code Snippets. Even though most developers have heard about them, I find when working with consulting customers that there are few developers who use them on a regular basis. Even if they do use them, they vastly underutilize them by only using a couple of them and never create their own. In this article, I give you a quick intro into what code snippets are, how they work, what is available out of the box, and how to go beyond that by quickly creating your own code snippets.
Code Snippets Overview
Code snippets were introduced in Visual Studio 2005 and allow you to emit a chunk of code into your editor by typing a few keystrokes (a shortcut mnemonic). I’m going to use C# for the examples in this article, but just realize that code snippets work in Visual Basic and other .NET languages as well. That chunk of code can just be a static chunk of code, but what really makes code snippets powerful is that they can have placeholders that you can quickly overtype when you invoke the code snippet.
Practical Programming: Sending Email
Sending email from a .NET application is incredibly simple:
…
SmtpClient _smtp = new SmtpClient("smtp.test.com");
_smtp.Send("from@test.com",
"derek@devshaped.com",
"Subject",
"Body");
With just these few lines of code, you are sending an email from from@test.com to derek@devshaped.com. Pretty easy stuff.
But what if you need something a little more complicated? The example above assumes the standard SMTP port for email with no authentication and an unencrypted connection. Fortunately these “complications” are quite easy to deal with in .NET.
Working with Brownfield Code
During our careers as developers we sit in training courses, conference sessions and vendor demos in which we hear about how easy and great technology XYZ is for creating applications. And almost every one of them assumes that we’re working on new development. I’m not sure about you, but I find that new (or greenfield) application development has been fairly rare in my career.
More often than not, we developers are working in companies that already have a suite of custom software. If you’re brought in to work on a specific project, it’s rare that the project hasn’t had something already started on it. As a result, most developers spend a large part of their careers working with or on someone else’s code. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Instead I think that it is something that we should embrace with good practices, strong tooling and a strong desire to succeed.