I spent a few days playing with Ruby on Rails a while back.  During the learning experience, there was one particular feature that I really liked.  It was the database migration scripts that get automatically generated for you.  I always wished I had something like this in the windows (asp.net) world.  It turns out there […]

Posted in Programming, SQL, Tips & Tricks, Visual Studio, database No Comments »
Tags: database, migration, schema

I am working on a feature that will let me import twitter messages to yonkly and wanted to write a test for it.  The method is private and I couldn’t get the unit test to see it.  I also didn’t want to use the private accessor class generate by Visual Studio because I was mocking […]

Posted in Programming, Testing, Tips & Tricks, asp.net mvc No Comments »
Tags: mstest, tdd, testing private methods, unit testing, vsts

Here is a quick method to shorten URLs using the TinyUrl API in .net - C# and VB
C#

public static string MakeTinyUrl(string Url)
{
try
{
if (Url.Length <= 30)
{
return Url;
}
if (!Url.ToLower().StartsWith(“http”) && !Url.ToLower().StartsWith(“ftp”))
{
Url = “http://” + Url;
}
var request = WebRequest.Create(“http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=” + Url);
var res = request.GetResponse();
string text;
using (var reader = new StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream()))
{
text = reader.ReadToEnd();
}
return text;
}
catch (Exception)
{
return Url;
}
}

VB

Public Shared Function MakeTinyUrl(ByVal […]

Posted in Tips & Tricks No Comments »
Tags: Programming, snippets, tinyurl

I am working on an asp.net mvc application and I wanted to make the user’s main page (profile) be www.domain.com/username.  This is a problem because the routing engine in MVC treats the first item after the domain as a controller.  Ofcourse I could do a {*catchall} and do my own parsing but why re-invent the […]

Posted in Tips & Tricks, asp.net, asp.net mvc 4 Comments »
Tags: asp.net, mvc, tips, url rewriting

I found this cool site that has a free wizard which helps you build your elevator (15 second) pitch. Here are some of my pitches:
Consultant
My name is Emad Ibrahim and I am a consultant specializing in .net development. I architect, design and create software. I can do it faster and better than the competition. […]

Posted in Interesting, Random, Startup, Tips & Tricks No Comments »
Tags: business, Startup, tips

The easiest/quickest way to fix a cross domain error is to create a test website to host your Silverlight application.

When you hit F5 to debug the application, it will run the development server and the address bar will say http://localhost:xxx/blahblah.  This will prevent a cross-domain error.
If you try to run it using an test html […]

Posted in Silverlight, Tips & Tricks, Web Dev No Comments »

You can use the Clip property on any item to clip its display area. For example if you have this two items rectBlue and rectRed like this

And you want to animate rectRed by sliding it out from the right side, without clipping it would look like this

But if you set the Clip property on […]

Posted in Programming, Silverlight, Tips & Tricks, WPF No Comments »

I am not sure if this is a bug or by-design but Canvases don’t stretch the way I expect them to - the Grid control seems to resize better.
If you want your Canvas to stretch and Fill its parent, there is an easy way to do this.
1. On initialization, set the Canvas width and height […]

Posted in Silverlight, Tips & Tricks No Comments »

RE: Silverlight 2 Beta 1 with Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview
You can Make your XAML silverlight page fit the whole browser window.

In Blend, select the user control from the objects and timeline

Set the width and height to Auto and the horizontal and vertical alignment to stretch

There will be arrows surrounding the control that lets you […]

Posted in Silverlight, Tips & Tricks No Comments »

Here is a quick tip.  If you have the following Enum
Enum Frequencies
DAILY
WEEKLY
MONTHLY
End Enum

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { […]

Posted in .net, Programming, Tips & Tricks No Comments »