While many still debate the value and appropriateness of Extension Methods in C# 3.0, I have always felt that there was still something missing. Extension methods allow me to add individual methods to classes; however, there are several cases where I...

On several projects, I have had the need to convert large HTML blobs into short text summaries that can be displayed in a list. For example, in SharePoint I often need to display lists of Publishing Page content and I want to summarize some of the HTML...

In 2007, I was working on a large SharePoint 2007 project and we discovered that after the system ran for 3-4 days (or 24 hours of simulated stress), performance would suddenly degrade significantly (i.e. minutes for pages to load, if they would load...

For twelve years, I was an architect of enterprise, commercial software. One of the most important lessons that I learned is that the software that you write today will be in use much longer than you imagine... MUCH LONGER! If you take a shortcut in your...

I'm a strong believer in creating accessible applications... not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because I believe that it results in interfaces that are more obvious. While studying the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit , I learned...

Someone posted a question to a discussion group asking for a way to create buttons like those in PowerPoint 2007 using XAML. Below is my first attempt. < UserControl x : Class ="TestApp.TestButton"      xmlns ="http:/...

I've been recently writing code with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) using raw Message contracts. The purpose of raw Message contracts is to allow the developer to be in complete control of the format of the message that is received and sent by...

Microsoft has made an important change between Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005/2008: By default, Visual Studio 2005/2008 projects have the “Check for arithmetic overflow/underflow” compilation switch turned off . In Visual Studio...

I work a lot with XML and XML will obviously play an important role in future development. Over the last couple of months, I've been observing some incredibly strange behaviors with namespaces. I was certain that I must be observing a bug in Microsoft...