C#

Professional Grade Hosting starting at $4.95

Mark H. Wagner — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 08:29:00 GMT

I have been hosting at WebHost4Life how for about three years. I cannot say enough good things about this hosting service. Yes, this is something of a shameless advertisement - but it is the honest truth. If you are in the market for a new hosting service with professional grade products, you should try WebHost4Life. Here is an article I posted a while back that covers my experience with WebHost4Life.

Here are the reasons I find the WebHost4Life hosting service of great value:

Excellent self-service control panel. (I can do it myself)
Unlimited Bandwidth/Traffice (no monthly fee suprises)
Excellent support with very good response
and Professional grade products

Google Web Part for SharePoint

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:21:00 GMT

Google Search Web Part

Mark Wagner
http://blogs.crsw.com/mark
June 10, 2005

Article: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/1009.aspx

I created a custom Google web part a few weeks ago for my demo SharePoint site. You can see what it looks like on my testing SharePoint home page http://sharepoint.crsw.com. The Google web part submits a search request by navigating the user directly to the Google search web page and performs a Google search using the Google search engine. I have since received a number of emails requesting to get this web part for use on their SharePoint sites, so I decided to make it available for others.

First and foremost, the Google name and search service are the property of Google. I have no affiliation with the Google name and its services.

Google is a must-have resource for my daily work. If I need to find something, I Google it, and nothing else comes close when searching on the Internet. With this dependency, I had to have it on my new SharePoint demo site. My SharePoint demo site is more of a test-harness at this point since it is hosted on a shared/public server, so don’t be too disappointed when you see it.

For those of you not familiar with Google, welcome to the Internet. Google is the single best Internet search service available on the Internet, for the Internet. If you need to find something on the Internet, Google will find it for you. This process of searching is commonly referred to Googling. If you Google something, your are using Google to search the Internet for it. For the rest of you, Google is probably how you found this article.

It is important to remember that this Google Search web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature. In order for Google to find any results, Google must have already searched and indexed your site. Also remember that Google will not be able to crawl and index pages on your SharePoint site that are not accessible to the public. This is where the SharePoint search has the upper hand. Again, this web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature, but to conveniently access the much used Google search from your SharePoint page.

Configuring the Google Search Web Part

Here is a picture of the web part configurations.

Google Image URL

Once you have installed the web part, in the configuration options of the web part is a Google Image URL property which defaults to an image on Google’s web site. You should use the default url for the Google image. I have made this property available just in case Google renames or moves their image.

This Google Search Web Part can be configured in three distinct ways.

Standard Google Search

Local Site Search

Custom Site Search

Complete article here...

WinFX: Guidelines and Best Practices

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 04 May 2005 10:22:00 GMT

The WinFX SDK Community Technology Preview Edition has some very good content. I recommend the reading the WinFX: Guidelines and Best Practices

http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_fxguidance/html/2995cebf-2b57-4cdb-8cac-0e171fb7b0b7.asp

Spence Prahl - Now Blogging

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 18:55:00 GMT

A sharp .NET developer has just started blogging. Spence is an excellent .NET developer and I expect good things to come from his blog in the future. He always seems to deliver something just a little extra special when it comes to software development.

MSDN Download Manager keeps suspending?

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:40:00 GMT

Jason Bunting has a cool little trick to keep it running here. Sometimes the obvious - is just not obvious enough. Good job Jason.

Visual Studio 2005 Standard Beta 2 Released

Mark H. Wagner — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 08:33:00 GMT

For those of you with an MSDN subscription, Visual Studio 2005 Standard Beta 2 has been released.

Convert a string to an enumerated (enum) value

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 08:12:00 GMT

Convert a string to an enumerated (enum) value.

Using the Enum.Parse method, you can easily convert a string value to an enumerated value. Doing this requires the type of the enum and string value. Adding the true argument will cause the case to be ignored.

Using the following enum for this example:

private enum Aircraft
{
   Beech,
   Cessna,
   Piper
}

You can easily convert the string to an enum value like this:

Aircraft air = (Aircraft) Enum.Parse(typeof(Aircraft), "Cessna", true);

Ideally you should wrap a try-catch around the Enum.Parse statement.

String Date Validator

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:19:00 GMT

Simple string date validator.

I am a big fan of maintaining a library of simple and clean helper methods. Here is a simple and clean way to verify if a string formatted date is a valid date. This allows you to encapsulate the exception handling making it easy to use and very readable - another important coding practice.

private static bool IsDate(string sDate)
{
DateTime dt;
bool isDate = true;

    try
    {
        dt = DateTime.Parse(sDate);
    }
    catch
    {
        isDate = false;
    }

return isDate;
}

What is your (assembly's) native tongue?

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:05:00 GMT

Per an MSDN TV episode (Using Managed Resources) - to improve the performance (albeit minimal - I expect) of your assemblies, you should include the following line in your assemblyinfo.cs

[assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute("en-US")]

This defines the default language for your assembly. This allows the .NET runtime to bypass the process of looking for a satellite assembly for the “en-US” (default) language if the current culture matches the assemblies default culture. Of course, assemblies intended for other languages should define that language as the default language.

Also, if you can put your satelite assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), the Common Language Runtime (CLR) will load the assembly faster by not having to verify the cryptographic assembly signature.

Visual Studio .NET Intellisense: CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 09:00:00 GMT

Intellisense is a must-have for me. One thing I tend to do is type a comma or the left parentheses just to get the Intellisense for the arguments of a method of class constructor, or overload list. I recently found out you can type CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE to force this to appear. - Thanks Spence!

Also, I have used CTRL + J quite often; and for some time now, to popup the Intellisense list of members for an object. As long as your cursor is on an existing object.method the list will appear. The prevents having to go to the object and type a period. This is another key combo I use quite often.

Intellisense is truly a time-saver!