SofiaDev.Org's Blogs

As it turned out, I've passed another BETA I took back in late November. I didn't get any notification from MS, so I supposed I failed. Until yesterday, when I opened my MS Transcript, I noticed there's another exam there:70-565 PRO: Designing and Developing...

I've just got the following email from MS:Congratulations on earning your Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Applications certification! We hope you enjoy the benefits of your certification and of membership in...

As of Dec 1st, I've started teaching official MS and custom courses in Silverlight & WPF in house. That basically means that if you're a company and you need training for your developers, you can contact me and I can arrange the course to be given...

I was upgrading an NH 1.x project to 2.0 recently, when I've found out there are actual config changes in NH 2.0, compared to the well known 1.x set of builds.Long story in short, here it is:In NH 1.x, we used to integrate NH into our projects by defining...

As of September 2008, JetBrains will give away one ReSharper license at every monthly meeting of the Sofia .NET UG.I want to thank the company for sponsoring us, since I personally think that ReSharper is one of those must-have tools every .NET developer...

SofiaDev.org is part of INETA, and as such will participate in the global SQL SERVER 2008 Community Launch Event. We're planning it for late October, just after DevReach. I'm currently looking for people that want to help with the presentations for the...

I'll be presenting about the Castle Project @ DevReach this October. We've been using it actively in the last few months, now working on our 3rd project using it.I have to say that it's a very well thought and designed framework that reminded me once...

Today the SofiaDev.org US will host its monthly meeting. The talk will be about Silverlight and will be held by Jason Beres, MS MVP and an author of a few books for .NET and one for Silverlight. The event will be broadcasted online at the following...

I haven't got the chance to post anything interesting in the last few months, but I believe now's a good time to do that. I'm proud to present the first INETA European Contest - the European Silverlight Challenge in its Bulgarian version. The web site...

Hello boys, I'm baaaack. As March 1st '07 I've got back home. Moving-in toghether with my girlfriend right in the center of Sofia. Kicking it up with a nice project for Tam Tam - the best place I've worked for. ...

Do you know, that there's a build-in check for empty/null strings in .NET 2.0? So instead of doing this:   string strValue = ""; if (null == strValue || strValue.Length <= 0) {   //do something } You can do this: string...

I've started a pet project of mine during the holidays, for automating the registration for SofiaDev.org. For now, the only way for registering is to get in touch with me (usually IM or email) and ask for an account. At the last meeting, a couple of...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/support/relnotes/netfx3/default.aspx...

A colleague of mine had a problem today, sending emails through Outlook Web Access, while the web access URL was in he’s “Trusted sites” in IE 7.0. A while ago, MS published an article, called “Replacing the DHTML Editing Control in Windows Vista and...

I was writing a method today, one that has to concatenate and format 2 strings. As every other developer on the planet, I’m using System.Text.StringBuilder class when I work with strings (for concatenating and formatting – because that’s what we’re using...

I’ve just got my new Toshiba Portege M400 – my first Intel Core Duo and Tablet PC @ the same time. And it’s great. It came just a couple of days before I went back to Sofia, for DevDays 2006. However, I think Toshiba has some problems with the preinstalled...

There’s a limited time free of charge offer by Red Gate Software for their product “SQL Prompt”. Check it out @ http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Prompt/index.htm...

Check it out here: http://blogs.sofiadev.org/blogs/branimir/articles/MyCSharpCaml_Generator.aspx...

I was writing-up an event handler with custom event arguments, getting ready for defining the event args class along with a delegate for the event definition (as you’re supposed to in .NET 1.1), when I’ve noticed that in VS intellisense is helping...

I’m working on a project on which I need to sort some custom classes. Today, I’ve decided to play around and find easier and faster way to deal with different sorting scenarios with the use of generics. I’ve a simple class hierarchy with a root abstract...

I’m currently finishing on a project which uses WSE 2.0 SP3 as a communication platform. At one point I’ve had an interesting problem, which I couldn’t find solution for (at least not according to the specs and WSE documentation). So I’ve decided to share...

I’m writing up a class that wraps all of the functionality I need for accessing AD in one place.So how do I get the LDAP path to the domain controller? It’s easy – just get it from AD itself. Here’s the code: using (DirectoryEntry rootDse = (PreAuthenticate...

One of the projects currently I’m working on is using nHibernate as a data persistence framework. If you’re not familiar with the concept, check out Nikola’s article on nHibernate.   Ideally we want to write as little as possible code that deals...

I was checking my profile at Vue this Friday, when I saw that the results for 50-529 are finally out. I've passed :). With this one I've 2/4 of the new .NET track passed in beta....

So let’s pick it off from where we’ve left the last time. We’ve defined some base classes we’re going to use throughout our solution: BaseList – abstract base class An abstract configuration A concrete implementation of the configuration And a...