Yesterday I introduced the How-To-Select Guides on my blog. Today I want to present our first published Guide entitled How-To-Select a PDF Component for .NET. You can download it by clicking on the cover below: We’ve actually had our Guide covering PDF Components for .NET online for several months, but since I only just blogged about the Guides …
Technologies are best when they are simple
What’s the next big thing? AJAX? Ruby on Rails? PC Virtualization? Open-Source Software? Data Security? Open Office File Formats? Windows Vista? Windows Live? Apple’s iWhatever? Yeah, all those things will get lots of hype, but the next big thing is something we’ve had access to all along: Simplicity Are my thoughts revolutionary? Nah, I’ve been …
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Anonymous Methods in C# 2.0: What’s Old is New Again!
Paul Kimmel recently wrote an article for informit.com entitled "Anonymous Methods in C# 2.0" where he made the following statement: Linguistically, I love methods, but as a practical matter anonymous methods may just be an example of some inventive person at Microsoft being a bit too clever. Unfortunately that was the pull-quote used to promote the …
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How does one define a “Quality .NET Developer?”
I was having a brainstorming session the other day with a member of my staff and the following question came up “How does one define a ‘Quality .NET Developer‘?” After discussion we realized it was a lot like one of the US Supreme Court Justice’s definition of pornography; when asked he stammered and said “Well, …
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Reviews of Desaware and Xheo Licensing Systems for .NET
There’s a very interesting review of .NET licensing systems at VB.NET Forums: a full review of Desaware Licensing System and a partial review of Xheo Licensing. I can’t say that I haven’t had similar experiences in the past. If you are considering the purchase of a licensing system for .NET, you definitely owe it to …
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My blog’s been quiet, but dotNetInfluencers.org has not been…
Though my blog has been quiet for several days, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on online projects. Since I launched it over a week ago, http://www.dotnetinfluencers.org/ has taken a lot of my time, but it is coming along better than I had hoped for! If you not familiar with what I’m doing over …
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Getting Past the XSLT Error: “Expression must evaluate to a node-set.”
So I just blogged about how I find XSLT somewhat frustrating. Admittedly some of the frustration is based on my relative lack of experience with XSLT. One area ripe with potential frustration is the concept of the node-set data type for which learning has caused me a bit of hair loss recently! A typical scenario …
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It’s Always Something (#1): Wrestling with System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransform and the Document() function
It’s always something! At Xtras, we have a rather sophisticated email broadcast system that we developed internally. Our system uses a set of tables in our SQL Server database that models the type of email, who it should go to, the mailing lists, etc. It loads each newsletter subscriber’s name and email address using a FOR XML …
A Microprocessor that runs .NET IL?
I just saw this at CNET: IBM speeds Java on mainframes. The first line of the article reads: The zSeries Application Assist Processor (zAAP) is essentially a dedicated processor for Java applications. Made me think: Hmm. Wouldn’t a microprocessor that runs .NET IL be cool? I would assume it would be possible. I wonder if …
Why .NET needs the (option of) less strictness
First, I’m honored Paul Vick was willing to read my long-winded essay, and second I’m honored he would blog about it. In this blog post Paul wrote: …Mike also raises the question of strictness. He makes the argument (echoed by Don Box and others) that many programmers would do better with a world that’s more …
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