Living .NET... : Resources

Regular Expressions

Manoj G — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:40:00 GMT

Regular expressions are one of programmer's best friends and I believe every programmer ought to dabble with Regex in some form or the other. .NET framework provides excellent support for Regex through the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace. Enlisted below are some great resources I recommend for creating and using Regex in .NET:

1: Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions

Its one of those 'must have' books you must buy as a software professional.

2. A Regex Tutorial at CodeProject.

Great article. The best crash course on RE you'll ever find on .NET.

3. RegexLib.com : Cheat Sheet and RE Tester

A really good repository of regular expressions and a great community too.

4. RegexDesigner.NET

A simple, yet very handy tool to try out and test regular expressions.

DLL Hell to Policy Hell to..

Manoj G — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 16:09:00 GMT

Came across a very interesting article on Future of Assembly Versioning, co-authored by one of my favorite authors - Jeff Richter.

The author runs us through a little bit of history in Component versioning, starting off with COM, where we had an infamous problem commonly termed as "DLL Hell". This problem was tackled in .NET effectively by having Strong Naming, but what resulted was a complicated version policy scheme, the problem which is commonly called "Policy Hell".

The author also mentions how both these issues are (sort of) handled in the forthcoming Longhorn / Orcas releases. It is pretty interesting that there would be two types Assemblies - Platform and Library. The Platform type would need to be used in cases where strict backward compatibility is required. So the onus is on the developer to make sure about backward compatibility. Another interesting feature accompanying Platform assemblies is Interim Roll Back, where, in the event where a new version breaks an application, admins can actually roll back to a previous version. Any later updates to the assembly would automatically roll forward the existing (rolled back) assembly. On the other hand, Library assemblies are used in the case where the developer is free to introduce any breaking changes (or innovate as the author puts it), without worrying about backward compatibility. Do read the article for more..

The author presses the point that there is no set solution to component versioning problems and even the proposed solution might be changed considering the fact that it is early days for Longhorn and Orcas!

Picks of the Week

Manoj G — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:31:00 GMT

1.Articles at ObjectMentor

Fabulous articles and white papers in a number of topics, dealing with Design, Patterns, Development Process and much, much more. A must visit.

2. Downloads at IDesign.NET

Fantastic set of code samples on .NET (Includes C# 2.0 samples). Code samples range from simple to fairly advanced implementations - Implementing ISynchronizeInvoke for instance.

Picks of the Week

Manoj G — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:01:00 GMT

1) Great collection of links at TheServerside.NET which are provided by DevelopMentor

http://www.theserverside.net/developmentor/

2) MSDN Channel 9

This is cool site started by 5 MS employees. This is more like an online bulletin board for stuff happening in MS Technologies. Lots of videos and related discussions here!

Picks of the Week

Manoj G — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:00:00 GMT

First of all, a big thanks to Susan for upgrading the blog engine. The blog looks better than ever before and has a lot of new nifty features too (like Image upload, which was perennially non-functional till today)

Sorry about my short slumber. I have quite a few posts in the pipeline. I shall starrt off with my picks of the week.

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

Another excellent resource from patterns and practices. 1000 + pages of awesome content..

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/ScaleNet.asp

A Threat modeling tool is now available

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=62830f95-0e61-4f87-88a6-e7c663444ac1&displaylang=en

The Antivirus Defense-in-Depth Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F24A8CE3-63A4-45A1-97B6-3FEF52F63ABB&displaylang=en

And..please do subscribe to MSDN Flash today (can do that MS home page). It’s the one stop shop for great links like the ones above.

Picks of the Week

Manoj G — Mon, 10 May 2004 03:29:00 GMT

This is one of the most useful links you can find - The complete listing of the GOF (Gang of four) patterns with downloadable C# code http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx. You would be finding many patterns already in the MS patterns and practices site ( like Observer, MVC, Singleton), but this one is the complete set with a taxonomical listing - a must see!

My second pick - Scott Mitchell's article series on Data Structures in C#. I guess the six part series is now concluded and has been a fantastic resource. The articles cover many data structures like Trees, Graphs, Sets etc in complete depth and the writing is very lucid too.

Part 1: An Introduction to Data Structures

Part 2: The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable

Part 3: Binary Trees and BSTs

Part 4: Building a Better Binary Search Tree

Part 5: From Trees to Graphs

Part 6: Efficiently Representing Sets

Picks of the Week

Manoj G — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:00:00 GMT

Just from this time's MSDN Flash..Good read..

1) Coding Best Practices Using DateTime in the .NET Framework

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/datetimecode.asp

2) Secure Coding Guidelines for the .NET Framework

http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/securecode/dotnet/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/seccodeguide.asp

Pick of the week - Panopticon Central

Manoj G — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 12:14:00 GMT

If you are a religious VB.NET developer, you have to mark this as your favorite. Panopticon Central is Paul Vick's blog. Fantastic stuff about VB.NET, code optimization, performance etc. If you are wondering who Paul Vick is, he is the person who has authored the VB.NET language specification and is certainly one of the best authority on the VB.NET language. (I had blogged about this a couple of days back)

Also make sure you bookmark your favorite blogs here: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/

VB.NET Language Specification

Manoj G — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 02:37:00 GMT

In my opinion, the language specification is what really answers all the "Why" questions of a language. The books you buy probably answer only the "What"s of a language.You can download the VB.NET Language specification here (202 pages). A must read for VB.NET devs again.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=bf32527d-187c-49fa-8c67-9e9105535550&displaylang=en

BTW, you can get the C# specification at

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-334.pdf

You might see the difference in the URLs where these are available. C#, as you know, is now an ECMA standard language you can think of VC# as Microsoft's implementation of this standard, just like .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and SSCLI are implementations of CLI. VB.NET is ofcource, proprietary.

Picks of the week - Articles N' Sites

Manoj G — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 08:30:00 GMT

Site of the Week - TheServerSide.NET

A Cool site. Lots of resources on .NET including news, reviews and Tech talks. The login still doesn't seem to work though

Articles for the week

1. Win32 -> .NET API mapping list at MSDN

An exhaustive table depicting Win32 API and their corresponding classes and methods in .NET

2. An Extensive Examination of Data Structures

This is part 2 of the six part series on Data structures in .NET. A good read

Picks of the week - Articles N' Sites

Manoj G — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 00:41:00 GMT

Strong Naming - A great article that talks about strong naming and details what digital signature is all about.

http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/strongNames.asp

VB.NET Internals - A must read for VB devs

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbtchmicrosoftvisualbasicnetinternals.asp

Site of the Week

A-Z about Interop - http://www.dotnetinterop.com/. Run by an MVP (Mattias Sjorgren, Norway). Damn neat.

An Old debate - NGEN V/s JITting

Manoj G — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 00:26:00 GMT

A great writeup by one of my favorite writers - Jeff Richter.
http://www.codeguru.com/net_general/Insights_NGen.html

Interesting thing to note here is that last caveat mentioned about NGEN: Ignored NGen'd File in Some Domain Load Scenarios.