Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Implements ICodeWithDotNet

  • Customizing Send To in Vista

    Ok, I admit it, I'm coming late to the game in terms of Vista.  I never played with any of the betas when they first came out.  And when it was finally released to some rather unflattering press, I smiled in content as I continued to move forward with Windows XP.  I finally moved to Vista back in November of last year when I got a new laptop.  With a core 2 duo CPU and 4gb of RAM, Vista has been running pretty good for me.  There's still the occasional hiccup that frustrates me and I'm really looking forward to Windows 7 – but for now, Vista works fine.

  • ReSharper: Access to modified closure

    On the advice of Jay Wren, I decided to try our ReSharper 4.1.  I had previously installed DevExpress' CodeRush and Refactor Pro.  CodeRush was uninstalled in less than a week.  There was nothing technically wrong with the product – it's a great product.  It just didn't "jive" with the way I typed.  There was too much "un-learning" that would need to be done on my part to really show CodeRush's power.  The Refactorings rocked and I loved the graphical indicators it used while refactoring.

  • The Essence of Open Source

    While doing catch-up reading on the Rhino.Mocks group on Google, I came across this thread about a problem someone was having with Rhino.Mocks.  What I thought was cool was the responsiveness of Ayende (the creator of Rhino.Mocks).  And I'm not singling him out (I hear he hates being put on a pedestal), but I'm highlighting the generic responsiveness that you are more likely to get with an open source project.  Here's a breakdown of the timeline:

  • Getting Func-y with Lambdas

    Let's say we've got some information stored somewhere (database, XML, file – it doesn't matter) about individuals.  For simplicity, let's look at a class that represents this data:

  • LINQ: Grabbing a single element

    Since I've seen code like this before and am also guilty of writing code like this, I thought I'd blog about an easier way to grab a single element from a LINQ query that Bill Wagner told me about at last night's AADND meeting.