A snippet-sharing tool for .NET developers

The steps for creating a Web Form Wizard in both Visual Basic .NET and C# can be found at: Building a Custom Web Form Wizard in Visual Studio .NET. Brendan Tompkins also offers up a discussion on customizing Visual Studio .NET templates in his blog entry Visual Studio .NET Templates - Modifying Your Default Templates.

What would also be nice is if you could allow code outside of your assembly to read the property value, but only allow code inside of your assembly to write it. You can use an access specifier inside the curly braces following the property name to achieve this.

One last thing worth noting about the property support is that it supports a shorthand syntax for those cases where you do not need any special processing for getting and setting a property.

Again, the compiler will generate the get_Name and set_Name methods, but this time will also provide a default implementation backed by a private String^ member variable. The advantage of this, of course, is that in the future you can replace the simple property with a more interesting property implementation and it will not break the interface contract of the class. You get the simplicity of a field with the flexibility of a property.

Mainsoft's tool is a Visual Studio add-on which compiles C# to Java byte code instead of to IL. They include a class library that provides support for .NET Framework stuff.

I was ultra-skeptical, but in practice, this tool is working surprisingly well. We had to make very few changes to the OpsLib code, all fairly minor. The resulting Java version of OpsLib passes our suite of regression tests, and that speaks volumes about the quality of work Mainsoft has done. Those tests are truly sadistic.

Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility.

ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. It works on executables and dlls alike. It comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output, see the accompanying documentation for details.

This tool allows you to compare two versions of an assembly, and determine the differences. The tool reports the differences as a combination of 'removed' and 'added' APIs.

Nice tool that can apply simple static rules for .NET compliance and some error checking.

Has the ability to "auto-fix" most things which saves some time.

It was crashing on me initially but support was fast.

There's a free version that does some nice things. You then pay for certain rule add-on packs.

Microsoft .NET developers can use Thinstall to link the needed portions of the .NET Framework into a single EXE that runs without any installation. Programs can even run directly from CDROM.

This is an interesting technique. I have been just deleting and recreating a test database, and all the test data before each unit test. Performance has been tolerable thus far, but I can see how it might not scale. -Nick

What we want is to be able to achieve the transaction functionality without all the overhead of writing our own custom Transaction manager class as prescribed in James? book. How do we do that? With COM+ Enterprise services.

There is a solution for large uploads with ASP.NET. You can use SoftArtisans FileUp v4.0, or the soon-to-be-released FileUpEE (Enterprise Edition). Both come with a custom ISAPI filter that you install in IIS. When you upload in .NET, the FileUp ISAPI filter handles the files and prevents memory from being swamped by the file. The Enterprise Edition can do multi-step client-to-webserver-to-fileserver transfers with SOAP.

Spec changes for C# 2.0. They seem to be adding a lot of things that take C# back towards the organization of C++ rather than that of Java.

They are now allowing anonymous classes for delegates like in Java. That?s not so bad.

They are adding ?generics? meaning C++ templates. As usual this is a mixed bag.

They are adding ?iterators? that generate sequences. I suppose that?s OK, but I don?t see much benefit.

The worst part is ?partial classes.? This means that the definition of a single class can now span any number of files. The scary part is this quote from the spec: ?Partial types allow classes, structs, and interfaces to be broken into multiple pieces stored in different source files for easier development and maintenance.? Easier maintenance? Yikes.

They?ve done some other things that muddy the language. For example, in this new spec they added 3 new keywords. However they didn?t want to break existing code, so these keywords can also be used as normal identifiers. How?s that for confusing?

If they keep on like this it will be C++ all over again. Maybe it?s there already!

-Jason

Part II

For a long time I couldn't serialize objects in .NET because I kept getting an error upon Unserialize which said that it couldn't find the assembly that saved this object, even though it was the executing assembly!

There is a flag on both binary and XML serializers (but curiously it is not present on their shared parent object) which lets you set whether the full path to the assembly or just the short name will be stored.

Then when you deserialize you need a custom assembly loader. You only want it installed when you load one of your objects.

I now provide sample code that works properly in my own project. It's quite general and should work for serializing any object in binary form. If you want XML form, just change the Formatter type. Of course you need to change the "CodeHistorian" string in the assembly resolver routine. You could make this routine completely general by extracting that string from the executing assembly object, but I didn't bother with this. ///

Welcome to the Windows Forms FAQ. Questions & Answers in this FAQ are from newsgroup posts, various mailing lists and the employees of Syncfusion. I have tried to mention the source wherever I could. If you think that you should be credited for an answer, please send me a note and I will be happy to add a credit mention.

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