Packer for .NET has been updated to include a CSS Minify mode which does the same for CSS that JSMin does for JavaScript. Thanks for this addition goes to Chris Lienert who updated the open source project with work done by Daniel Crenna and Michael Ash to port YUI Compressor. Packer for .NET Download Why Minify CSS? CSS can be very complex and it helps to place inline comments in your stylesheets to assist with maintenance. These comments...
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery. Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps:...
Matt Warren, who provides the most detailed HOWTO for creating your own LINQ IQueryable provider, has now published a dedicated toolkit on CodePlex: IQToolkit is essential if you are building your own LINQ IQueryable provider. It contains common tools and source code you can apply to your own project. In the toolkit you will find useful techniques for manipulating LINQ expression trees, implementing IQueryable providers, and a host of extensible...
Friday, November 21, 2008
If you’ve ever written any non-trivial ASP.NET control, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a Control Builder. Basically, it’s a class that you associate with your control and that affects the way your control gets processed at parse time. While ControlBuilder has been around since the ASP.NET 1.0 days, a very powerful new feature was added to it in 3.5 (i.e. VS 2008). Unfortunately, we never had a chance to tell people...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Sometimes I see myself in weird situations, having to debug applications in test environments, but for some reason I'm not able to use Visual Studio. Not going to specific details about my environments here. However, it's possible that someone out there have a similar issue. For these cases, I use Reflection to dump the contents of my objects into a string and save it in a text file to analyze later. This is the "Dump" method: public static...
Monday, November 10, 2008
Tracking down those pesky flaws in a piece of code is, in my humble opinion, the most challenging part of software development. Thankfully we have a top-notch debugger built into Visual Studio. Unfortunately, the debugger is one of the features of Visual Studio that I am the least proficient with. I know how to set a breakpoint and take a look at...