Developer News

Review: GDI+ Custom Controls - PACKT Publishing In most of

Review: GDI+ Custom Controls - PACKT Publishing
In most of the projects that I have worked on, I ended up creating custom controls. Creating functional custom controls involves a lot of careful coding. In this book, the authors have explained how to build a custom controls using the Microsoft .NET framework. Greater importance is given on how to build a control which deals with the GDI. GDI stands for Graphical Device Interface. GDI+ is the .NET framework representation of the graphical class library. These class libraries provide us with a rich set of functionality which can be used to develop some flashy controls. This review looks at each chapter of the book, explaining what is covered and analyzing if the book meets its goal of teaching GDI.
Jesudas Chinnathampi (Das)

TestDriven.Net 2.10: ‘Go To Reflector’ now supports generics

Over the past year the ‘Go To Reflector’ command has become a first class citizen inside TestDriven.Net. You will find the ‘Go To Reflector’ button on many different context menus inside Visual Studio. The ones I use most often during development are the ‘Code Context’ and ‘Project Reference’ menus. When I’m debugging I tend to use the ‘Call Stack’ and ‘Modules’ context menus.

For a long time I’ve put off attempting to add support for generics to the ‘Go To Reflector’ command. The Visual Studio CodeModel and StackFrames APIs don’t really support generics, so I wasn’t even sure if this would be possible. This was becoming a problem with more and more code being written that uses generics. I decided it was time to bite the bullet and see what could be done.

I’m happy to say that TestDriven.Net 2.10 now has pretty decent support for generics.

You can ‘Go To Reflector’ from your generic class definitions. Generic methods, classes, fields, properties and nested classes are all supported.

You can round trip and ‘Go To Source Code’ from inside Reflector. I often find using Reflector is the fastest way to navigate my own code.

When you’re debugging you can ‘Go To Reflector’ from any stack frame in the ‘Call Stack’ window. This is particularly useful when the debugging option ‘Just My Code’ is turned off. When an exception is thrown you can quickly see what caused it by selecting the top of the call stack.

Note: For updated ‘Go To Reflector’ on ‘Call Stack’ support you will need to be using TestDriven.NET 2.10.2173 or later (I released this a few days after the original 2.10 build). You can read the release notes and download the latest version from here.

Interface Oriented Design Book Excerpt: Inheritance and Interfaces (Chapter 5) By Ken Pugh
Finding commonality among classes makes for effective object-oriented programming. Often, programmers express that commonality using an inheritance hierarchy, since that is one of the first concepts taught in object-oriented programming. We’re going to go to the other extreme in this chapter to explore the difference between using inheritance and using interfaces. An excerpt from Interface Oriented Design.
Click here for the full article.

Creating Agile Project Reports with TFS and Reporting Services - Part 2
In this second part of the series, Eric shows the reader how to create a burndown chart using Reporting Services, Visual Studio 2008, and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 for an agile project. After giving a short introduction and the requirements, he examines the creation of burndown reports with the help of relevant SQL statements and screen shots.
Eric Landes