Clark Sell : .NET

App_Offline.htm

csell — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:12:54 GMT

Been catching up on the ole blogs when I ran across a post from Scott Guthrie about a new ASP .Net 2.0 feature with a file called App_Offline.htm.

"One of the new features I talked about was the "App_Offline.htm" feature in ASP.NET 2.0, which provides a super convenient way to bring down an ASP.NET application while you make changes to it (for example: updating a lot of content or making big changes to the site where you want to ensure that no users are accessing the application until all changes are done)."

From: Scott Guthrie, App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

I must admit thats pretty awesome and very welcomed.

Testing Code Snippets

csell — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:27:11 GMT

Code Snippets just rock. I thought I would post my testing code snippets.

CSTestSnippets.zip (2.2 KB)

VBTestSnippets.zip (2.13 KB)

Just add them to the appropriate place under "My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\"

VS 2002 / 2003 / 2005 Conversions and Building

csell — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 04:19:38 GMT

The following are some different resources to either convert your Visual Studio 2002/2003 projects to Visual Studio 2005 or just target the 1.1 framework in Visual Studio 2005.

Step-By-Step Guide to Converting Web Projects from Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 to Visual Studio 2005

Jomo Fisher on MSBuild

Robert McLaws MSBuild Compatibility Toolkit 1.0

Nagaraju Palla's Building binaries targeting .NET 1.1 and .NET 1.0 in TeamBuild

Configuration Management in .NET 2.0

csell — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:51:55 GMT

Paulo Reichert posted a GREAT walkthrough / sample using the new Configuration Management features of .Net 2.0.

System.Diagnostics Tracing and DebugView

csell — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 18:13:00 GMT

The other day I ran across DebugView by Sysinternals. After playing with it for a few I suddenly had a re-found love for System.Diagnostics.

“DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don’t need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.” from Sysinternals

This means you have a nice little exe you can carry on a thumb drive and collect those trace events at runtime on from any machine. Let’s look at some code.

First define a TraceSwitch. This switch gives you the ability to determine when to throw an event. You can define multiple switches.

public static TraceSwitch GeneralTraceSwitch = new TraceSwitch(”General”, “My Trace Switch”); if ( GeneralTraceSwitch.TraceError ) Trace.TraceError( “YOUR ERROR MSG” );

Now let’s setup configuration. There are two major sections, listeners and switches. Listeners define where System.Tracing should send your events. The example below sends events to both the EventLog and a text file. Having said that has no influence on DebugView, you do not have to define a listener for DebugView to pick them up. The switches section defines the level of events to throw. 1 is the minimal number of events, while 4 is everything.

<configuration > <system.diagnostics > <trace autoflush=”true” indentsize=”0″ > <listeners > <add name=”EventLogTraceListener” type=”System.Diagnostics.EventLogTraceListener” initializeData=”Team Build”/> <add name=”TextWriterTraceListener” type=”System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener” initializeData=”.\ci.log” /> </listeners > </trace > <switches > <add name=”General” value=”4″ /> </switches > </system.diagnostics > </configuration >