Derik Whittaker

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• Upgrading a Smart Device Project to Compact Framework 3.5

  ***** Disclaimer: I am a total NOOBIE to working on Smart Device Projects ***** Today I needed to upgrade on of our smart device projects from Compact Framework 2.0 to 3.5. I figured that I could do this via the properties dialog, but could not (see image... Posted Sep 10 2008, 08:49 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: .Net, HowTo

• Foundations of Programming EBook - Great Read & ITS FREE

  If you have not hear, Karl Seguin has authored a great, short eBook which he is giving away free to the world.  This book is based of his blog series of the same title. Do yourself a favor and go download this book, it is pretty short and is a great... Posted Jul 10 2008, 08:38 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with no comments Filed under: Agile, .Net, Shout-Out, Featured, Announcement

• Little nugget of simplification when loading an XDocument

  Today I needed to load in an XML file into memory for later use. At first I was going to use the XmlDocument library (old habits die hard), but later switched over to the XDocument library.  Why, not because one is better (ok, so I think that XDocument... Posted Jul 02 2008, 09:53 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 9 comment(s) Filed under: .Net, HowTo, Linq

• Nice side affect of Automatic Properties

  Today it dawned on me another nice little side affect of automatic properties. I was creating an interface today that ONLY had properties and when I was done I needed to create the concrete object that implemented said interface.  All I had to do... Posted Apr 29 2008, 01:17 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• How to have a Single Config File for multiple developers

  In my last post I talked about how you can share a single config file among multiple project in a solution.  One of the feedback comments I got was how to have a single config file for multiple developers or even multiple environments.  So,... Posted Apr 16 2008, 08:13 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net IDE, .Net, HowTo

• Thoughts on Testing an API

  Over the past few weeks I have worked on a few products for my client that will be used as API's.  These API's will be used by either their own (external) clients or other internal departments.  Working on these projects made me think... Posted Apr 14 2008, 07:32 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Development, Agile, .Net, TDD

• Simple extension methods to help with Asserting values

  In the past I have written about the Fail Fast principle.  This is a principle I try to live my development life by.  I would rather explicitly check for possible failure points then have a runtime error crop up.  In the past when writing... Posted Apr 10 2008, 07:49 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net, Opinion, Featured

• Linq and Delayed execution

  If you have not taken a look at Linq (either Linq to objects or Linq to sql) you need to do so.  I would say it is the coolest new feature that was released with .Net 3.5.  But there is one thing that you MUST keep in mind when using Linq. ... Posted Apr 07 2008, 01:11 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .Net, Featured, Linq

• Sorting List's the .Net 3.5 Way

  This post is another in the recent string of How-to's. But it is just so hard to resist. .Net 3.5 has so many cool features, it is just fun to explore them all. Ok, so here is the issue we are going to solve today. We have a list of entities and we... Posted Mar 28 2008, 09:09 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net, Opinion, HowTo, Linq, Lambda

• Simple way to Convert IEnumerable<Entity> to List<IEntity>

  Today I ran into a case where I needed to convert a result set of IEnumerable<Entity> from a Linq2Sql command to a List<IEntity> in order to return the data back to the caller.    We all know that giving the following code public... Posted Mar 28 2008, 12:04 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 13 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net, Lambda

• Automatic Properties, where have you been for the last 8 years????

  With the recent release of .Net 3.5 one of the new features they added is Automatic Properties. Automatic Properties allow you to NOT need to create an instance variable for your properties (assuming you only need simply getter/setter functionality),... Posted Mar 21 2008, 08:28 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• Is var the new Dim?

  In C# .Net 3.5 they added the var keyword. The intent the var keyword is to allow the object type to be implicitly inferred from the expression used to initialize the variable. However, more often then not I hear people using it because it saves them... Posted Mar 21 2008, 10:19 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 11 comment(s) Filed under: .Net, Humor

• Using System.ComponentModel Attributes to your advantage

  The System.ComponentModel namespace (more information here ) in .Net contains an array of various attributes that every .Net developer should know about.  These attributes provide a way for the developer to implement design-time and run-time behavior... Posted Jan 30 2008, 07:03 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net IDE, .Net, UI, WinForms, HowTo

• Visual Studio 2008 Launch Event Announced

  Microsoft has announced the dates and locations for their next Launch Event. They are launching VS 2008, SQL 2008 and Windows Server 2008 all here. One nice thing about attending these Launch Events is the FREE SOFTWARE. You can get more information about... Posted Jan 19 2008, 01:22 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• .Net 3.5 Framework Namespace posted updated

  Brad Abrams announced that there is an updated version of the poster available. You can get more information from Brad here . Till next time, Posted Jan 14 2008, 07:50 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with no comments Filed under: .Net, Shout-Out