I'm in the process of getting up to speed with DSL tools, and while there's a whole lot of info out there, at the end of a long day I'd prefer to watch a video on a new subject rather than pour over the written docs, but trying to locate all the video's can be difficult, and even more if you want to view them in the right order. Well this is my effort to make things a little easier. Unless otherwise stated these videos's relate to Visual Studio 2008 edition of DSL tools, as I discover more DSL video's I'll add them to the list. If you know of a good one I've missed, leave a comment and I'll get it added. More...

For anyone that's read my blog entries you've seen me make mention to a framework that I've been working on. Well today marks the release of the first beta of part of that framework. The Database Explorer API, is a database schema API that is designed to make accessing database schema information easy and intuitive. More...

While I don't normally get involved with deploying web applications (we normally have 'people' for that) however I did have to deploy the application you're using now. Which brings me to the blog post I recently found which discusses the top 10 best practices for ASP.NET which I've linked to on my toolbox page. The main one that concerned was of concern to me was forgetting to switch off debug mode.

   1: <system.web>

   2:   <compilation debug="false" />

   3: </system.web>

This setting appears to have a large impact on production web sites so I'd check out the detail in the this post to get all the details. Also you might want to check the config files of the production apps you work on or blog if you host your own; lets just say we may need to update a few of ours!

I went along to the .NET developers association in Redmond on Monday where Ken Levy demonstrated the extensibility tools of VS.NET 2008 (which also relates to VS 2005 to some extent). It seems that MS have decided to offer the VS 2008 shell license free! If you're anyone who's looking at providing third party tools (related or not to Visual Studio) and need a good IDE host, you've just saved yourself a bucket load of time. Also, it runs in two modes, integrated (merges with your instance of VS 2008) or isolated where it acts as its own (customisable too I was led to believe) IDE without the need for VS 2008. More...

This article was originally published in the April 2003 issue of Visual Studio Magazine. Their online version has been archived, so it has been reproduced here. The articles code requires updating for .NET 2.0 which will be the subject of a future post.

ASP.NET has brought about a huge change in how we as developers think about designing a web site. We all know that ASP.NET now gives us the opportunity to create reusable custom controls which we can drag and drop onto our pages, which can even remember the information entered between postbacks, using the viewstate mechanism built into ASP.NET. This has proven to be a huge advantage in designing our pages, by allowing us to bring our more traditional programming model to the Web for the first time. ASP.NET also allows us to add these same controls dynamically at runtime. More...