There are a multitude of Argument Parsers available online. So why am I writing my own? Well to be frank… I did a search and couldn’t find anything that would be either “easy” to implement. I know that this is not much, but hope other programmers might find this useful if they are as lazy as I am and looking for a quick solution :-) I was actually looking for a parser which would return something like a Hashtable which i can loop through and load the values into properties of some sort. So here... [More]

I recently downloaded the Enterprise Library 4.1 released in October 2008. I guess the enterprise library has done a lot of improvements from the 3.x version to the current 4.x that's available and not just making it work with .NET Framework 3.5 and integration with WCF. I downloaded the library and as all bad developers do, immediately started looking into the Quick Start code sample and trying to figure out, how to get it quickly integrated with my application. Whatever happened to doing rese... [More]

  When you publish an ASP.NET website using Visual Studio it will give you a pre-compiled site. This process of pre-compilation does various actions on the ASPX pages. Files are treated differently. There are various reasons why you would want to pre-compile your ASP.NET site. If you need more details on that you could go here or here.   Now when you have a pre-compiled site, there are a few problems you run up against. For example you run into issues with Global.asax and I have read s... [More]

One of the painful tasks for a MOSS Admin is to make a list of all site-collections, sub-sites and nested sites. If you have allowed your customers to create their own sub-sites off a site collection or root site, it can turn out to be a really tough trying to create a list of all those. Our production engineering team came across the exact same problem. Recently they were planning to migrate the production data to another Test server to do some testing. While planning this, we realized that the... [More]

One of the things I am really annoyed about is the finally block of the famous trio.... try/catch/finally. Before I get into details, let me explain that I really like the finally block. It has a nice sound to it and of course it does a damn good job, it acts as a placeholder where we can clean up resources. Now if you check out best practices and on exception handling, its strongly recommended that programmers should use the finally block. So here is why I am bit ticked off by the finally block... [More]

Recently I was working on some code where it was required to open a file, write something to it and close it. I ran into a small problem while considering the code. Since this was a Doc file the problem was that how do I check if the file was already open or not?  If the file is already open for editing by some other user, how do I write to it? Like all good programmers I looked around for a code sample on the Internet, although I found some great examples on the net, I didn't find a good C... [More]