(Dan Mabbutt) A few days ago, I wrote about how Focus and Select seem to almost completely duplicate each other. That’s not the only duplication in VB.NET. For example, the Button object has a PerformClick method. But it totally duplicates simply calling the event directly.

(Jay Miller) First, take a look at the Convert class. The Convert class offers methods to convert to and from every base data type, but for the purpose of this tip I’m only going to use the Convert.ToInt32() method. The method accepts a string parameter and returns an integer. If you pass in a strin

(Scott Guthrie) One of the things that many people have asked for over the years with ASP.NET is built-in support for developing web applications using a model-view-controller (MVC) based architecture.

(Ben Hall) This is the second in a series of articles covering the Rhino Mocks mock object framework for the .NET Framework. The aim of this series is to provide you with an understanding of how mock objects are used, how they can improve the quality of your unit tests and how mock objects can make

(Ruslan Sudentas) This explains how to integrate TortoiseSVN – a Subversion Source Control client with Visual Studio.NET. It is a “how to” cookbook that outlines specific steps needed to set up a functional Source/Version Control system to be used in a .NET project with all of the tools accessible i

(Jay Miller) Creating your own custom exceptions is very easy and allows your code to be more explicit as well as being able to provide more user-friendly error messages. To show how to use custom exceptions, I will use connecting to a database as an example. Connecting to a database is something yo

(Irina Medvinskaya) While core functionality and usability of the application is always one of the most important aspects, various visual effects may improve the way users feel about a particular application. Even though you may be able to implement purely cosmetic features in an application, it’s i

(Jeff Atwood) I thought Ligaya Turmelle’s post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers. Since SQL joins appear to be set-based, the use of Venn diagrams to explain them seems, at first blush, to be a natural fit. However, like the commenters to her post, I found that the Venn diagrams

(Dina Fleet Berry) Dynamic database-driven web sites are required if your site has large quantities of data to upload, manage, and serve back to your customers. However, IT departments typically say this creates too big a load for the database — hence many people keep the files on the hard drive al

(Jim Mischel) With 500 megabyte disk drives well under 100 dollars, it’s easy to assume that you’ll always have enough disk space for whatever program you’re building. Unless you’re crawling the Web and downloading every music or video file you can find, you’re unlikely to fill up that 500 megabyte