Productivity

Many folks are bashing VS2005 but there are some really great things the folks at MS have added for us in VS2005. One of my personal favorites is the code snippets mechanism. I personally find this feature to be kind of underestimated and will try to give you some basic knowledge about what code snippets in VS2005 are, how to manage them, how to find new, and of course how to “do it yourself” By definition code snippets are referred to as “ IntelliSense Code Snippets” – by nature they are reusable, task-oriented blocks of code, encapsulated in a XML file...

Many a customer has asked us "What, the heck, is XhtmlPage and do I need it to run your components?"  It is an oddity in our QuickStart examples application that needs some explanation.  Atanas, the creator of the class, has already started that in his "Making ASP.NET XHTML 1.1 compliant" post. Today I was describing a testing approach on the Extreme Programming mailing list that relied on the fact that our controls render standards compliant XHTML, and you could leverage that to write tests using the XML API in .NET -- XPath is sooo convenient for that.  And then it hit me!  What...

I am a big jsUnit fan. I can't imagine what JavaScript development would be like if that tool did not exist. We all know that code without proper unit test coverage is legacy code. It is a time bomb waiting to go off in the hands of the developer that touches it next. Over time I have noticed a pattern in my jsUnit usage. I usually wear one of two testing hats when writing tests:The browser compatibility hat. Most developers know how to do things in Internet Explorer, and Gecko-based browsers. Those differences are widely known and people are used to writing...

As I have mentioned earlier (see "To leak, or not to leak…(memory) – Part One") the closures are the most common reason for memory leaks in Internet Explorer. They are extremely good at forming circular references especially in the context of Host objects. The most common example is event handlers “owned” by a Native object which are attached to a specific event raised by a DOM element and hold a reference to that DOM object kept in the Native object. Example:DOMElement.Event ->  NativeObject.EventHandler -> current execution context scope -> NativeObject. DOMElementRefference -> DOMElement Very frequently websites and web applications with a rich UI include components which produce...

A few weeks ago a couple of colleagues and I established that our source control system (VSS 6.0d) needs to be updated. There were numerous issues that were plaguing our daily struggle with Source Safe – slow speed, frequent crashes and file corruptions. Naturally we began looking for alternatives of the aging software (version 6.0 was originally released with VStudio 6.0 and was only patched a bit with the release of VS.NET in 2002). In a nice bit of synchronicity with our efforts, Visual Studio 2005 was just released and introduced a brand new version of Source Safe (it was internally...