Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

As always is the case in December, GANG doesn't hold a regular user group meeting.  Instead, we invite all supporting members to our Holiday Party.  Like last year, we'll be having a nice get together at Microsoft's Southfield, Michigan offices from 6:00pm – 9:00pm EST.  We'll provide pizza and other snacks, beverages, some XBOX 360's all wired up for play and a few Texas Hold 'Em games running.

In a recent thread in the ADVANCED-DOTNET mailing list, the topic of multiple threads and WinForms came up.  As you probably know, Windows Forms controls can only be accessed/manipulated from the thread on which they were created.  The topic of Control.Invoke came up and Richard Blewett made the following comment:

Mike Nichols wrote a neat jQuery plugin to automatically order a list of items (like <TR>'s or <UL>'s).  This plays very nicely with MonoRail's SmartDispatcherController and DataBind attribute:

Hammet posted a couple of images he created that showed the main contracts used by MonoRail.  Pretty cool.

Last Wednesday was election day at GANG.  Our fearless leader for the past three years, John Hopkins, had let us know earlier in the year that he would not be running for president in November.  Instead, he wanted to focus his efforts on sponsorship and publicity for our group.  With the way the economy is, running a group on donations and membership dues alone is difficult.  With John at the helm of our sponsorship efforts, I have no doubt that we'll be in good shape in the upcoming year.

If you're using Microsoft's unit testing framework that is built in to VS2008 (and some VS2005 SKU's), you're probably aware of the Assert class.  You use that a lot to make assertions on properties and return values to determine if your unit test passed or failed.

If you missed PDC, now's your chance to catch the best parts of PDC right here in the Detroit area.  From the MSDN Developer Conference website:

If you like to live on the leading-edge, check out Dennis Burton's post about the new features in NUnit 2.5 Alpha 4.  Looks like some really nice stuff.  I especially like the improved exception handling with Throws.Exception.