Blue Blip : .NET

Server-side Automation of MS Office Applications

Siva M — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:35:35 GMT

I usually don't talk too much about or discuss things that are commonly known to everyone. Why add noise unnecessarily when something has already been discussed overwhelmingly by the internet community and all it takes is an internet search to find...(read more)

XML Utility Method in .NET BCL

Siva M — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:23:11 GMT

XML has a set of special characters that cannot appear in element/attribute names and values: &, <, >, " and '. For example, <entityText>Mark & Spencer's</entityText> is not valid. The valid equivalent is <companyName>Mark...(read more)

Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.0 - Here Comes!

Siva M — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:51:41 GMT

The latest version of Microsoft Enterprise Library, v4.0, is finally here for download ! The most important additions in this release for me are VS 2008 support and integration of Unity dependency injection container (Unity Application Block). Go grab...(read more)

.NET Training Kits - Free Download

Siva M — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:12:34 GMT

Couple of training kits available for download from Microsoft: .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit...(read more)

.NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

Siva M — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:49:39 GMT

Came across this recently: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7b645f3a-6d22-4548-a0d8-c2a27e1917f8&displaylang=en&tm Available in both XPS and PDF forms, each with one large size and split/tiled format....(read more)

Sending Emails with Delivery Receipt Notification

Siva M — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:33:14 GMT

Of late, I was getting few queries on how to get email delivery notification and email read notifications when sending emails programmatically using the .NET Framework classes ( System.Net.Mail ). Getting email read notification option is done by adding...(read more)

Enumerating Computers in a Domain

Siva M — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:43:00 GMT

I saw a question in a forum asking how to enumerate computers available in a domain. Though it might seem little difficult, it can be accomplished in less than 10 line of code. Thought would make it as a post for everyone's benefit. Here we go: using...(read more)

.NET Framework Source Code for Debugging Support

Siva M — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:28:45 GMT

As announced earlier by Scott Gu , the source code for most of the namespaces in the .NET framework is available . This means that you can now step into the framework source code while debugging your applications and see its actual implementation. I had...(read more)

Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2 Out

Siva M — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:31:00 GMT

Get the VS 2008 Team Suite beta-2 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=428c076f-e3ef-4290-9ff4-f6fd8f180b7d&DisplayLang=en...(read more)

Getting the IP Address of the DNS Server(s)

Siva M — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:39:00 GMT

Yesterday, I came across a question in one of the .NET newsgroups asking how to get the IP address of the DNS servers available in the network. Though there is no direct way of getting this information (yet, at least to my knowledge) via .NET 2.0 class...(read more)

Storing Application-wide Data in WPF

Siva M — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:29:00 GMT

It is very common in Windows applications to store application-wide data such as database connection strings, application title and folder path,etc that should be available for the duration of the application instance. The general strategy for storing...(read more)

Changing Log On Credentials of Windows Services

Siva M — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:19:00 GMT

There was a question from an internal group asking for a way to programmatically change the log on name (and of course password) of a Windows service - this is the user account, local or domain, under which the service process runs when started. Unfortunately...(read more)

Peformance Comparison: WCF Vs. The Rest

Siva M — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:42:00 GMT

Excellent article comparing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) framework with other Microsoft distributed technologies (ASP.NET Web Services, .NET Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting): http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx...(read more)

Impersonating Network Share (UNC) Path Access

Siva M — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:22:00 GMT

One of the features of the ASP.NET application that I am currently working on requires copying dynamically generated files to a network share path. As guessed(!), the user identity of the ASP.NET worker process (IIS application pool, in case of Windows...(read more)

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Source Code Available

Siva M — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:38:00 GMT

If you too are interested in looking at the internals of ASP.NET AJAX (Atlas), download the source code at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ef2c1acc-051a-4fe6-ad72-f3bed8623b43&DisplayLang=en Great material if you want to see...(read more)

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Available

Siva M — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:27:00 GMT

The much awaited and the first service pack for VS 2005 Team is here at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx SP1 is available for Visual Studio 2005 Express and TFS is also available. However, the SP1 for Vista still seems...(read more)

.NET 3.0 RTM'd

Siva M — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 09:08:00 GMT

The much awaited .NET 3.0 (aka, WinFX) is now available for download in RTM mode! This also means Windows WPF, WCF, WWF & CardSpace all available in RTM too! :-) Go get them: .net 3.0 Runtime alone: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx...(read more)

Profiling .NET Code with StopWatch

Siva M — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:15:06 GMT

One of the new diagnostics tools introduced in .NET 2.0 is the System.Diagnostics.StopWatch class. It lets you time your code with simplest profiling code possible! And I use this class very regularly during my development/desting. I use it especially...(read more)

Switch Internet Explorer to Offline Mode

Siva M — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:48:17 GMT

I saw a newsgroup post today asking about programmatically (.NET way) switching Internet Explorer to offline mode (checking IE's File | Work Offline menu item). I posted a small C# code that accomplishes this to the newsgroup. Thought would make a blog...(read more)

Getting Windows Process Owner Name

Siva M — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 04:24:18 GMT

The System.Diagnostics.Process class gives almost every data about a running process. But, the most-wanted information it doesn't give about a process is the process owner name. And I ran across a situation recently that asked for the same thing - here...(read more)