Couple of days ago, my blog application started crushing. At first, I assumed that my ISP provider is to blame. Somewhat irritated I submitted the question to the support crew and couple of emails later, they informed me that the blog application was taking over 100MB in RAM space (which triggers the server to stop the application). In addition I noticed that the number of visitors increased dramatically over the last couple of weeks. Quick look under the hood revealed that during post rendering, source code is rendered "on-fly", which utilizes Wilco.SyntaxHighlighter.dll control. Considering the fact that there are many posts that display the source code and that there are many visitors viewing them, it is possible that memory usage would increase drastically. To eliminate the issue I decided to render the code at the time of post editing (as opposed to rendering during page loading). The only elegant solution (in my case) was to use Windows Live Writer with source code plugin. However, I could not find a plugin that would satisfy my needs, so I decided to write my own.

More...

Unlike Silverlight, Flex Builder does not integrate with Visual Studio programming environment. Therefore, debugging ASP.NET or Flex applications can become very cumbersome, especially when they become very large. However, with Flex Builder 3, Adobe has made possible to utilize built in ASP.NET web server (Cassini) to debug Flex applications. Following post describes one possible way to set up both environments to make debugging easier.

More...

SQL Server 2005 has been released for a while now, and most of the new features are well known throughout programming community. Right after the initial release, I downloaded a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express, eager to explore new features. At first, there was a lot of reading and browsing the documentation; then I moved onto converting smaller projects to SQL Server 2005 edition, and finally I decided to move larger projects to my new favorite DBMS. Throughout conversion process, I was poised to utilize the newest feature of SQL Server 2005: CLR Stored Procedures.
More...

Multiple Document Interface (MDI) is a technique to separate data layer from presentation layer, which is primarily utilized in MFC. As an MFC developer looking to develop applications in .NET, I was searching for a similar concept. My interest was mostly in GUI design, rather than complete MDI/SDI solution. At first, I was very happy to learn that Windows Forms provided assistance in MDI development. As always, I fired up VS.NET 2005 and created sample project. Couple of minutes later, I had MDI-like application, where I could add/remove views very quickly. It felt too good to be true, which later proved that it was. At first I wanted all of my child views to be shown maximized. In addition, I wanted all child views without a control bar. Everything went well, except that my forms could not get rid of control bar. In addition, form resizing did not function properly. As always, I searched the web and found numerous attempts to solve these issues. All solutions suggested following steps:
More...

In my previous post Displaying .NET DataSet with Crystal Reports I discussed one way to report the data that does not come directly from a database. In this way, it is possible to preform more complex data analysis and present the result using Crystal Report engine. Following post addresses similar issue. However, here, the data to be presented is not stored in a DataSet, but rather in a .NET Collection, which implements IEnumerable interface.
More...

Couple of days ago, I started playing with Crystal Reports engine included with Visual Studio.NET. After creating several reports using SQL Express database, I started wondering how to create reports that require more sophisticated data analysis. At first, my thoughts were to utilize stored procedures to create report result, and and then display the result using Crystal Report engine. However, it turned out that Crystal Report engine has some limitations when it comes down to stored procedures. Crystal Reports documentation states that stored procedures can be utilized if they contain at most one SQL SELECT statement. In addition, the documentation states that no return parameters can be utilized (parameters declared by SQL keyword OUT, or INOUT). Clearly, complicated data analysis cannot be performed using single SELECT statement. Considering these limitations, I immediately started to investigate options to present a structure using Crystal Reports. At first, I considered a .NET containers, but Crystal Reports engine did not seem to provide any convenient way of displaying such structures. In addition, I noticed that every report that I designed, required the structure of the data to be known at report design time. At that time, two options came to my mind:
More...