outcoldman' Blog

Few days ago I have an experience with setting CCNet build server for continuous integration environment. What is it continuous integration and why you need to know it you can learn from many articles, and the better of course is article written by Martin Fowler. Also you can read a book Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, which Martin Fowler advises well.

XDT Transformation is a new feature of ASP.NET 4.0 named Web.Config Transformation.

I want to make public one small project on CodePlex. Everybody knows that you can work with CodePlex like with TFS client and with SVN client as well. But really I can’t work with it from SVN client. When I tried to add some binary file (it was dll) I got the error “Server sent unexpected return value (200 OK) in response to PUT request for …”. How to solve this problem I don’t know, I found thread at CodePlex's discussions Can't commit binary files using TortoiseSVN, but last message was at past year. Ok, I’m working with TFS at work, so for me it will be not a problem connect to CodePlex with TFS. But there are some distressing case, Visual Studio always ask credentials at every new connection to project. And I didn’t find a checkbox “Save credentials”. But I found the method. Read more...

At our product we have a client Silverlight part and server-code part, which contains a lot of WCF methods. We don’t use ASP.NET Compatible mode, because we want to leave an opportunity to deploy server part to server without web-server role (without IIS). Really, I don’t know why we chose this way, because all of our installations at current moment are on IIS. But we have what we have, so we haven’t ASP.NET Compatible mode, and as an expected result we can’t get HttpContext.Current instance at server WCF methods. One of WCF Service is a RESTful service, which at his methods returns report files, so it can handle GET-queries from browsers. Read more...

As you know MS SQL Server Express Edition hasn’t Agent Service, which can be used to schedule daily backups or other periodic administrative tasks. But you can use for this standard Windows Schedule tool. Read more...

Just became a lucky owner of this book C# IN A NUTSHELL 4th edition. This is a fourth edition of this book’s series. I saw previous third edition of this book, we presented it on one of our events at Yaroslavl State University, but that book was a Russian translated version and published in Russia, this is was bad side of that book – all books at Russia printed on really bad paper. I should say that I didn’t read this book by end, but already I was surprised. Why? Why I heard a lot about Richter CLR via C# (English version of 3rd edition of this book I already have, and this book are waiting my attention), and just a few words about C# IN A NUTSHELL, at least in my sphere. I just listen once about this book at one of the podcast of Alt.Net group, and this words was Richter it is really good book, and C# IN A NUTSHELL it is a good handbook. My opinion is - you should read Richter if you want to develop with .NET. But if you want to develop on .NET with C# you should read C# IN A NUTSHELL too.... Read more...

Data export from DataGrid to Excel is very common task, and it can be solved with different ways, and chosen way depend on kind of app which you are design. If you are developing app for enterprise, and it will be installed on several computes, then you can to advance a claim (system requirements) with which your app will be work for client. Or customer will advance system requirements on which your app should work. In this case you can use COM for export (use infrastructure of Excel or OpenOffice). This approach will give you much more flexibility and give you possibility to use all features of Excel app. About this approach I’ll speak below. Other way – your app is for personal use, it can be installed on any home computer, in this case it is not good to ask user to install MS Office or OpenOffice just for using your app. In this way you can use foreign tools for export, or export to xml/html format which MS Office can read (this approach used by JIRA). But in this case will be more difficult to satisfy user tasks, like create document with landscape rotation and with defined fields for printing.

In Windows 7, I really liked an opportunity to change the position of the windows by pressing hotkeys Win + (Left | Right | Up | Bottom):