Programmers Unlimited

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03/22/11--20:56: PostSharp Weaving: Community vs Professional – Reasons to get a professional license (chan 1291347)

If you have not already read my article Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming and PostSharp then I suggest you start there. PostSharp has a community edition and a professional edition. The community edition lacks a few features such as event-level aspects and the visual studio add-ins but for most it’s just enough to get the [...]


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04/07/11--15:59: Method wait/retry functionality using PostSharp (chan 1291347)

Not to long ago I needed a way for a method to retry itself if the return value was not an expected value. My exact scenario was a requirement to upload a report to a vendor via FTP every 5 minutes. On the other end of the FTP was a service that watched for the [...]


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04/08/11--13:47: Whole Tomato Visual Assist X Review Part 3 (chan 1291347)

Finally I was able to get around to re-evaluating Whole Tomato Visual Assist X (10.6.1845.0). Here is my final opinion. I used the points mentioned in the email to me from Kevin Sikes (See review #2) as a starting point and working through a project to get a feel for the other features. What was [...]


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04/29/11--13:09: dFactor 0.6 released (chan 1291347)

For those who don’t know what dFactor is, it’s a Visual Studio add-in I developed that provides convenience refactoring/code generation options such as implementing INotifyPropertyChanged interface on a class or converting a class to a singleton. See a list of features below. This new release includes a new feature that Visual Studio SHOULD have by default, but doesn’t. That feature [...]


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05/15/11--19:07: VS2010 Startup Error: The operation could not be completed. (chan 1291347)

All of the sudden Visual Studio 2010 decided to not work. The install was on a laptop I had not touched since I last did a presentation at a user group (about 2-3 weeks). I go to start it up to test out the code for my presentation (that night) and got a lovely error message [...]


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06/07/11--08:58: Review: .NET Windows Development: Everyday Tips, Tricks & Optimization (chan 1291347)

.NET Windows Development: Everyday Tips, Tricks & Optimization By Alberto Población “What comes after the “…For Dummies” book? There is a big gap between the introductory/beginner books and the rest of them. Beginners looking for that next step usually find it to be a steep climb. This book helps to fill that gap.” – Dustin [...]


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07/13/11--16:04: Most Valuable Member 2010-2011 (chan 1291347)

Every July, the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group holds its annual Most Valuable Member event to honor the group’s members who have gone above and beyond for their group and community. The MVM content uses a points based system where any member can submit points for one or more qualifying activities such as helping to [...]


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IMAG0247

07/27/11--11:17: Applying aspects to 3rd party assemblies using PostSharp (chan 1291347)

[Related Article: Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming and PostSharp] There is undocumented functionality in PostSharp 2.1 (2.1.2.3 or higher) that allows us to apply aspects to assemblies that we don’t have the source code for. I’m going to show you how this works, but first I have state that this functionality is undocumented because it [...]


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DummyApp-ILSpy

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

08/01/11--12:28: PostSharp: Why are my arguments null?! (chan 1291347)

I see this question a lot. The developer has created an aspect and when they are stepping through they are seeing that the advice method arguments are null. The most common example of this is the MethodExecutionArgs.Exception. We can easily reproduce this “issue”. Example If you compile this code and step through it, the args [...]


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PostSharpNullArgs1

PostSharpNullArgsILSpy1

PostSharpNullArgs2

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08/16/11--10:57: Exposing internal methods in 3rd party assemblies for external use (chan 1291347)

To start out, I’m going to state that I don’t condone this, but if you need it then you need it. I expect to get some nasty comments about pattern violation this or encapsulation that so go ahead and send them in. This is just an extension of my previous post about modifying 3rd party [...]


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kick it on DotNetKicks.com

01/18/12--13:02: Learn T4 with my PluralSight course (chan 1291347)

My new course on T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) has gone live and it’s ready for your viewing pleasure. If you have any feed back, please send it to me. T4 Templates on PluralSight.com This course introduces T4, Microsoft’s code generation tool that comes with Visual Studio. The Text Template Transformation Toolkit dynamically produces text [...]


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dustin-davis-v1

01/24/12--10:34: Indexing DataTables (chan 1291347)

That’s right, I’m still using DataTables. Why? Because they best fit the requirements for what I am doing. I’m also taking advantage of parallel processing via the TPL. A lot of the operations I need to do would be much easier via PLINQ and POCO’s such as joins, grouping and searching. Because I’m working with [...]


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01/24/12--14:48: Change Request Pattern – Parallelism and non thread safe collections (chan 1291347)

My current project makes heavy use of DataTables and parallel processing via the TPL. DataTables are not thread safe and really bite the dust hard when asked to do more than one thing at once. My project breaks up operations that need to be performed on a DataTable into groups that can be executed concurrently. [...]


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01/26/12--11:55: DataTables != Thread Safe (chan 1291347)

The title of this post might seem really silly considering MSDN specifically says they aren’t thread safe, but there’s more to it than that. It says DataTables are not thread safe for WRITE operations which is a major ‘”Duh” statement, but in reality they are not safe for some read operations. I’ve been having some [...]


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01/27/12--12:02: PostSharp with projects targeted at x64 (chan 1291347)

I’ve been working with a project that processes a large set of data so I’m targeting x64 only. I needed to apply my performance and logging aspects to check execution times of each method but when I went to compile I received a build error from PostSharp “Platform mismatch. You cannot run PostSharp on a [...]


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ps-tab

01/30/12--09:51: What I’ve learned by presenting at code camps (chan 1291347)

Last year, out of no where, I decided that I wanted to present at the San Diego Code Camp after receiving the email announcing it. I had never attended a code camp but I wanted to go. Why I wanted to present, not having any previous experience with code camps, is beyond me. I’m a [...]


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Winking smile

02/01/12--22:39: It’s ok to mock a Person (chan 1291347)

Update I worked up a video on Typemock. Check it out. Original Post Ok, that’s a bad attempt at a humorous pun, but it’s still a valid statement. TDD exploded a few years ago and has gained tremendous following and prestige in the development community. I’ve never actually practiced TDD other than tutorials and more [...]


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Winking smile