http://www.alteridem.net Software by Design Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:28:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In my last two posts, I have been developing a small utility library to do the grunt work of copying data from an instance of one class to an instance of another type. The Copier class from my last post allows me to copy all public properties from one class ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/07/22/extending-copyhelper-using-extension-methods/ In my last post, I created a method that does the grunt work of copying data from an instance of one class to an instance of another type. I often find myself copying data between the properties of my data layer classes and those of my user interface like this. ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/07/21/extending-copyhelper-using-generics/ One thing that I find tiresome when using the various Model/View patterns is the constant copying of data between the model and the view. Too often, I find myself writing code like this to copy data between an ICustomer and an ICustomerView; // Copy the data from ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/07/09/method-to-copy-data-between-objects-of-different-types/ Today I was working writing auto-updating for some software. I wanted to base it on the Product Version property in the installer MSI file, so I needed some code to read that from the file. It took a fair amount of searching and code tweaking, but I finally worked it ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/05/20/read-properties-from-an-msi-file/ I have been contacted people who cannot attend my Toronto Code Camp session on log4net tomorrow requesting a copy of my presentation and example code. I cannot find it posted on the Code Camp site, so here is a copy for anyone who is interested. The presentation is in PowerPoint ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/02/29/log4net-slides-and-example-code/ I've been doing a lot of managed C++ programming lately and I had forgotten what a pain it is switching back and forth between the header file and source file.  Back in the days of Visual Studio 6 I had a macro that switched between the CPP and H file, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/02/26/visual-studio-macro-to-switch-between-cpp-and-h-files/ I found out last week that I will be speaking at this year's Toronto Code Camp on March 1st.  I will be giving an Introduction to log4net from 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM. I will begin the session with an overview of the license, features and capabilities of log4net, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/28/speaking-at-toronto-code-camp/ Do you ever find yourself using DateTime to time a section of code?  Do you have code like the following? DateTime start = DateTime.Now; // Perform a long process Thread.Sleep( 1968 ); DateTime end = DateTime.Now; TimeSpan duration = end.Subtract( start ); Console.WriteLine( ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/14/the-stopwatch-class-in-net/ In log4net speak, an appender is an output destination for a log such as a file, the console, a database or even email.  log4net ships with so many appenders that most of us will never need to write our own.  There are cases where you may find a need for ... http://www.alteridem.net/2008/01/10/writing-an-appender-for-log4net/ Here is a cool Visual Studio feature that almost nobody knows about. If you want to open up a file in your solution, but can't be bothered to dig down through your projects and folders to find it, try this, Click in the Find box in the toolbar, ... http://www.alteridem.net/2007/09/11/quickly-findopen-a-file-in-visual-studio/