Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

This year's Day or .NET is scheduled for Saturday, April 28th 2007 at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  This all day event is organized by developers for developers.  The event is FREE ($0, no cost!) to all of those interested in .NET development!

At this weeks GANG meeting, Martin Shoemaker will be presenting "Do, Undo, Redo, Do Over: A Generics Command Pattern Implementation".  He's going to use generics to build simple yet powerful implementation of the Command Pattern.  You won't want to miss this if you're in the area.

I've created a simple reproduction case highlighting a problem I recently had with COM interop.  I've got a VB6 app using a .NET 2.0 component exposed to COM.  The component in this sample is pretty simple:

I had some pretty simple code that checked if an array of integers was in ascending order.  I needed to check a second list to see if it was also in ascending order.  The only problem was that is was an array of doubles.  The logic is identical for both lists.  The only difference is the type of data acted on.  This is where generics shine!

From CNET News:

In an earlier post, I had talked about a Windows service I was working on.  This service periodically performs an HTTP GET request to check if a device that accepts incoming HTTP requests is still working.  It was pretty simple to perform the GET with .NET -- something I'm sure many of you have done hundreds of times before.

Neil Cowburn has a very interesting post on using ILMerge with Compact Framework apps.  It seems that, by default, ILMerge always uses the .NET Framework Assemblies.  Neil talks about the targetplatform and platformdirectory command-line arguments that can be used to tell ILMerge to use the proper assemblies (the Compact Framework Assemblies in this case).

I've got a small project that involves a windows service.  The service is still in the development stages so I'm using the Application event log to keep track of what it's doing.  There's a lot of messages that get sent to the log right now (and yes, I know there's better ways to log but for this work, the EventLog is quick and easy).