The .NET Framework 4.0 contains a plethora of command line tools ranging from build, deployment, debugging, security to Interop tools, and so on. Here’s a list of important command line tools in the .NET Framework 4.0 which can be run using the Visual Studio Command Prompt. The description of these tools has been taken from the MSDN documentation.

How does one test the user-interface of a web application? Too often, the answer seems to be 'clumsily, slowly, and not very well'. The technology of automated, repeatable, testing of websites is still developing, but it exists;  and Michael Sorens is here to describe an even better approach based on Selenium

Should every Visual Studio project really be in its own assembly? And what does 'Copy Local=True' really mean? Patrick Smacchia is no stranger to large .NET projects,  is well placed to lay a few myths to rest, and gives some advice that promises up to a tenfold increase in speed of compilation.

In this article, we will see how to log the SQL queries that get generated by Entity Framework. We will also some see profiling tools available.

In this blog post, I will cover two interesting tools that, when combined, can bring great value and speed at the beginning of any new software project that has to meet standards that are to be re-used for every project. The tools? Templify and NuGet.

Every project starts the same way:you create a place to put solution artefacts,on one file system, on one computer.Templify helps you work smart, not hardby reducing repetition.

NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. NuGet is a member of the ASP.NET Gallery in the Outercurve Foundation

Microsoft's been filling out the Web Stack with more and more right-sized LEGO pieces lately, and today ScottGu announced the developer preview of NuPack. It's a piece of the stack that's been notably missing for years and after using it for a while now, I'm not sure how I lived without it.

NuPack is a package management system for .NET. The goal of NuPack is to make the process of incorporating third party libraries into your solutions as simple as possible.

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

Learn how Umbraco – the fastest growing open source ASP.NET CMS – can help you build amazing websites, without restricting the way you write your markup, or the way you write Controls. In this session you’ll not only get an overview of what Umbraco has to offer and how to build a complete site in less than an hour, but also learn how to extend it. We’ll look at integrating with Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Azure, and with a little luck, a speaking plastic rabbit too, using nothing but Umbraco, Visual Studio and a few lines of .NET code.

I hadn’t got around to looking at it before but Neils Hartvig (@umbraco on twitter) gave a great talk about Umbraco Basics at Tech Ed Europe this year and you can watch it here.

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Drop your bags, fix a drink, and grab the Windows CD—it's time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives' computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you're cursing all the auto-starting crapware.

DirSync Pro (Directory Synchronize Pro) is a small, but powerful utility for file and folder synchronization. DirSync Pro can be used to synchronize the content of one or many folders recursively.

HDGraph helps you to free disk space : it finds for you the largest folders on your drive.
 
It's a free tool allowing to graphically display the hard disk space usage : it shows all the directories and subdirectories of the hard drive on a single graph, allowing to see the largest directories at a glance.
 
It is compatible with all storage visible in the Windows explorer : folder of hard disk drive, USB key, network folder, CD, DVD, etc…

OverDisk is a disk usage browser. It can be used to quickly find out how a partition's space is distributed among the file system hierarchy.

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags.

It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.

Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library.

Smells Like Teen Spirit van Nirvana blijft op de eerste plaats, voor het vijfde jaar op rij en voor het negende jaar in totaal. De nummers twee en drie verwisselen van plaats. Metallica was twee jaar lang de dichtste belager van Nirvana, maar die rol wordt nu overgekomen door Stairway to Heaven van Led Zeppelin, dat nog nooit zo hoog stond. A Day in the Life van The Beatles is een opmerklijke hoogste stijger. Meer…

De medioren en senioren van vandaag zijn niet meer de bejaarden van dertig jaar geleden, maar dat neemt niet weg dat hun eerste kennismaking met moderne technologie en communicatie niet altijd van een leien dakje gaat. Sms'en, bijvoorbeeld, vergt toch enige precisie én kennis van de korteberichtjesetiquette. Op When Parents Text laten jongelui gênante/grappige/cryptische sms'jes van hun ouders ('Me: i want a tattoo for Christmas / Mom: as long as it says i <3 mom!', 'Mom: Hi. What are you doing? / Me: At the library studying for my organic chem exam. / Mom: Homo. / Me: Excuse me? / Mom: I meant to spell GOOD. sorry.' of 'Mom: @(*.*)@ / Me: ??? / Mom: its a monkey lol') achter.

During the last few weeks, I've had the chance to go more in depth with jQyery and general site performance. I've found some techniques that makes my site go much faster. I don't know if they're all best practice, but this article is meant to at least give you some good ideas.

Tonido allows you to access and share ALL of your desktop's files, documents, photos, music and videos from any­where through a web browser or your smartphone. No Uploading,
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Taking a smartphone out of the box for the first time can elicit a wide spectrum of emotions, starting with unadulterated excitement that can quickly devolve into panic, chaos, and confusion: what do you do now? How do you make it awesome? How do you emanate an air of "cool" on the subway by using apps specifically designed to make you look like a badass? Well, fear not, newly-minted Android smartphone owner: as always, we've got your back. Read on for all the apps, accessories, and tips you should be investigating right this very second.

Q² or QuickQuery Editor is an editor that helps prototyping queries on complex schema's by automating the writing of queries. No need to type complex queries with join conditions you need to look up, just double-click the relation to use, the columns to show,…

The features of the editor include:
- Support for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases
- Automatically discovers columns; double-click to add them in the query
- Automatically discovers table references and proposes them as joins
- Supports inner and outer joins
- Aliassing of tables and/or columns
- Grouping operators and easy grouping correction/removal
- Conditions on columns as well as a custom Where field
- Saving query sessions
- …

Let us explore few concepts about Delegates, Anonymous methods, Lambdas and Expression Trees. These code examples are pretty simple, you can fire up a C# Console application in Visual Studio and try these examples if you are interested.

jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform.

A list of some good Coding Standard Documents. They are useful not just from a review perspective – going through these documents can definitely help you and me to iron out few hidden glitches we might have in the programming portion of our brain.

Microsoft .NET Framework version 4 includes a major revision of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with heavy investments in performance. This new revision introduces significant design changes from the previous versions of WF that shipped as part of .NET Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5. It has been re-architected from the core of the programming model, runtime, and tooling to greatly improve performance and usability. This topic shows the important performance characteristics of these revisions and compares them against those of the previous version.

Individual workflow component performance has increased by orders of magnitude between WF3 and WF4. This leaves the gap between hand-coded Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and WCF workflow services to be quite small. Workflow latency has been significantly reduced in WF4. Persistence performance has increased by a factor of 2.5 – 3.0. Health monitoring by means of workflow tracking has significantly less overhead.

Naast sites als Megaupload en Rapidshare om bestanden te delen hebben we gelukkig ook fraaiere sites zoals Wetransfer. Sinds kort is er een nieuwe service actief met een twist, Ge.tt maakt het mogelijk om bestanden al te downloaden of te streamen terwijl je ze nog uploadt.

Historical Maps
Experience five of the world's most beautiful old maps and discover their secrets

Digital Worlds
Find out how we map virtual spaces and understand our world today

DataContract versioning requires when some modification has been done to the existing DataContract exposed to the client from the service or vice versa. If either service or client is changing the schema of DataContract exposed then new version of DataContract come into action and both party involved in communication should be able to accommodate the changes done in the DataContract.

In this article, I am going to show how to enable windows authentication on WCF Data Service. 

Various native .NET framework types include an overloaded version of the ToString method that accepts a format string. This reference sheet provides a list of standard formats and custom format specifiers for numeric types, DateTimes, GUIDs and enums.

This article is expected to
- Introduce patterns to you in a simple, human readable (?) way
- Train you how to really 'Apply' patterns (you can learn patterns easily, but to apply them to solve a problem, you need real design skills)
- Provide you a fair idea regarding the contexts for applying the following patterns – Builder, Observer, Strategy and Decorator (well, they are few popular design patterns)
- Demonstrate you how to apply the Observer pattern, to solve a design problem

ExtensionMethod.NET is a database of C# 3.0, F# and Visual Basic 2008 extension methods. It contains many user-rated extension methods that will expand your code library immediately.

Extension methods add functionality to existing classes and allow you to expand the .NET framework. This way your favorite functions integrate seamlessly into the framework. For more information about extension methods visit the C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 2008 MSDN Library pages.

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