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An interesting paper on the performance of four new .NET 4.0 concurrent collection types: ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentStack, ConcurrentBag, and ConcurrentDictionary: Thread-safe Collections in .NET Framework 4 and Their Performance Characteristics (from the MSDN Parallel Computing Developer Center)

PDF poster can be downloaded here.

LearnDevNow.com is offering approximately 15 hours of free Visual Studio 2010 training (requires free Sign up):

Exploring Visual Studio 2010 Using Visual Basic or Visual C#  (full course)

• Investigate new language features and see the benefits of the new WPF-based IDE.
• Learn about many of the new ASP.NET Web Forms features.
• See how the all-new Workflow 4.0 works and get started learning its features.
• Create services using the new features in WCF.
• Drill into new WPF features, focusing on new controls, data binding and more.
• Create Silverlight applications using the new designer built into Visual Studio 2010.
• Incorporate Office 2010 features into .NET applications, focusing on SharePoint 2010.

Exploring Visual Studio 2010 ALM Tools  (4 out of 8 modules)

• See the new features of Visual Studio 2010 for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
• Understand about Team System and Excel Reports as well as Ad-hoc reporting.
• Then move on to Version Control with Team Foundation Server version control concepts
• Learn about Microsoft Test and Lab Manager for test plans for both manual and automated testing.

Just an on post from a conversation I saw on a C# list: .NET Framework 4 Migration Issues:

This topic describes migration issues between the .NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the .NET Framework version 4, including fixes, changes for standards compliance and security, and changes based on customer feedback. Most of these changes do not require any programming modifications in your applications.

• Features Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2
• What’s New (SQL Server 2008 R2)

A question that came up on the SqlDownUnder mailing list today was how to create an index using SMO and specify an included column. The documentation is extremely scarce; I could find no mention of it in MSDN. Greg Low came to the rescue by noting that the IndexedColumn class has an IsIncluded property.

This is illustrated in the following C# snippet:

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, May 27th where Andrew Parsons will build a simple 2D shooter game for Windows and Xbox 360 in an hour from start to finish, and hear how you can do the same thing with the tools already at your disposal not just for Windows and Xbox but also the upcoming Windows Phone 7.

• TOPIC:   XNA Game Development – with Andrew Parsons
• DATE:    Thursday, May 27th, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE:  Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:    Free. All welcome

Andrew Parsons is the Academic Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Australia which means he gets to travel the country talking to students about cool technology – stuff like Xbox, Windows Phone, cool dev stuff, tips and tricks with Office, PhotoSynth, Pivot and more. Combining his 15 years as a professional developer and 8 years as a professional games journalist prior to joining Microsoft, his passion for video game development has seen an outlet through XNA.

Update: although this works, it makes VS2010 open really slowly…

There does not seem to be an installer for VS2010. You can install the VS2008 version of CopySourceAsHtml (from here), and then manually edit the CopySourceAsHtml.AddIn file located at C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Addins so that both Version elements are set to 10.0:

<?xml version=“1.0“ encoding=“utf-8“ standalone=“no“?>

<Extensibility xmlns=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/AutomationExtensibility“>

<HostApplication>

<Name>Microsoft Visual Studio Macros</Name>

<Version>10.0</Version>

</HostApplication>

<HostApplication>

<Name>Microsoft Visual Studio</Name>

<Version>10.0</Version>

</HostApplication>

<Addin>

<FriendlyName>CopySourceAsHtml</FriendlyName>

<Description>Adds support to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for copying source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML.</Description>

<Assembly>JTLeigh.Tools.Development.CopySourceAsHtml, Version=3.0.3215.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=bb2a58bdc03d2e14, processorArchitecture=MSIL</Assembly>

<FullClassName>JTLeigh.Tools.Development.CopySourceAsHtml.Connect</FullClassName>

<LoadBehavior>1</LoadBehavior>

<CommandPreload>0</CommandPreload>

<CommandLineSafe>0</CommandLineSafe>

</Addin>

</Extensibility>

I recently needed to get all files in a folder hierarchy, so I quickly wrote the following C# snippet:

List<string> files = FindMatchingFilesRecurse(startFolder, "*.txt");

… 

public List<string> FindMatchingFilesRecurse(string folder, string filePattern)

{

    List<string> fileList = new List<string>();

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(folder))

    {

        FindMatchingFilesHelper(folder, filePattern, fileList);

    }

    return fileList;

}

private void FindMatchingFilesHelper(string folder, string filePattern, List<string> list)

{

    list.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles(folder, filePattern));

    foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(folder))

    {

        FindMatchingFilesHelper(dir, filePattern, list);

    }

}

But .NET 4.0 now contains the same functionality in a single method call (and as a bonus, it’s approximately 20-30% faster!):

List<string> files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(startFolder, "*.txt", SearchOption.AllDirectories).ToList();

In a recent post, Securing your application. Part 1 – Securing your connection, Brian Madsen talks about encrypting your database connection string, but fails to mention that using this technique does not stop passing unencrypted passwords over the network to your database server.

Whenever possible, you should use Windows authentication instead of SQL authentication to connect from your ASP.NET application to your database server. You should still consider encrypting your connection string to protect server connection details, such as the server and database name.

For ASP.NET 2.0 applications, you should store connection strings in the <connectionStrings> section of your application’s web.config file. The connection string used with Windows authentication must include either the Trusted_Connection=Yes attribute, or the equivalent attribute Integrated Security=SSPI, as shown here.

  <add name="MyDbConn1" 
       connectionString="Server=MyServer;Database=MyDb;Trusted_Connection=Yes;"/>
  <add name="MyDbConn2" 
      connectionString="Initial Catalog=MyDb;Data Source=MyServer;Integrated Security=SSPI;"/>
 
  

The above two strings are equivalent and both result in Windows authentication to the database.

Ref.: How To: Connect to SQL Server Using Windows Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0