Welcome to part two of our series on building a Windows application using test-driven development (TDD). In the previous article we drove the design of our entity classes and data access layer by means of unit tests. The unit tests acted more as specifications for the system rather than tests, since...

In a hot discussion thread in msforums.ph about the value of unit testing and adopting test-driven development (TDD), a suggestion was made to illustrate how TDD is used in creating a simple application, specifically Keith's October code challenge . In response to that, I've decided to write...

Language Integrated Query Language Integrated Query (LINQ, pronounced "link") is a Microsoft .NET Framework component that adds native data querying capabilities to .NET languages using a syntax reminiscent of SQL. Many of the concepts that LINQ has introduced were originally tested in Microsoft's...

My former colleague asked me if it is possible to attach an alternating color to a DropDownList control, similar with the GridView’s alternating rows. I found out that you can achieve that, by setting the background-color of the ListItem using “style” attributes. Here is the code. ...

It was my first time to join a community event in Singapore during yesterday's Heroes Community Launch and it was a blast! It was also cool to see that of nine presentors during the event, three of us are Pinoys. I definitely am looking forward to meeting more of the community people soon. First...

I will be speaking tomorrow at the Heroes Community Launch 2008 here in Singapore with my favourite (boring?!) topic...Unit Testing! Only this time it's about the testing framework that comes with Silverlight 2's beta release. Kinda excited and nervous at the same time, since it'll be my...

One of the task that a developer needs to accomplish is to code a module for logging, and creating it from scratch will take some of your precious time. So to be a little more productive, we can use a tested library like Log4Net. I have browsed for some pages and found a lot of variations. So putting...

Wow, I've been in a black hole for months! The usual excuse -- busy at work on projects. Now that we've gotten our app into production, we're now into firefighting, er... I mean maintenance work for that app. Here are some of the lessons I've learned in optimising and debugging our Windows...

I have a task that will delete files in a certain directory, specifically a file with “*.csv” and *.log” extensions. Unfortunately System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(string,string) doesn't support multiple search pattern. To be able to achieve my requirement I created a method that accepts...

Keith posted a great article demonstrating Linqs capabilities. There he was asked if his examples where " closures ". Let me take this opportunity to explain how closures are used in Linq by clarifying what a closure is and showing how the Linq queries are translated at compile time(from linq...

Somebody sent me an email today asking me about an article I wrote a few years ago detailing how to generate random strings and numbers in C# and VB.NET . He asked me if I could add function to the code that creates a random character set to be used as a base for the allowed characters in the random...

This was a major announcement , and lots of people were already blogging about it when I turned on my PC this morning. My initial reaction was -- what for? I think that for those who create custom libraries and controls, this will be a godsend. But for the rest of us developers, why do we need to debug...

In my early years of college as a CS student I learned about short-circuit evaluation . Short-circuit evaluation denotes that the second argument is only evaluated if the first argument does not suffice the value of the expression. I found out that short-circuit evaluation in C# is different from VB...

In the most basic case, the Hashtable class is used to do mapping of key/value pairs of objects. For example, assume that you have User ID mapped to User's Fullname: Hashtable users = new Hashtable(); users["001"] = "Marasigan, Raimund"; users["002"] = "Marasigan...

Some of you know about the C# trivia series that I started in MSForum's C# section . Good thing some of these posts were revived since they were missing months ago. Here are the links: Trivia #1 - Arraylist's initial size Trivia #2 - String concatenations and compiler Trivia #3 - Passing reference...