Community developer blogs

Scott Dorman

Recent Posts

• Sams Teach Yourself C# 2010 in 24 Hours

  Posted: 26 Jun 2009 at 23:54 by Scott Dorman

  I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Sams Teach Yourself books, at least in passing if not in owning one. I am very excited to announce that I will be joining the Sams Publishing authoring team for their upcoming Teach Yourself C# 2010 in 24 Hours book. This new edition will be quite a bit different from the previous editions since it will be much more language-focused and will take a more holistic view of the language.

• Tampa Bay IASA June 2009 Meeting Reminder

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 13:39 by Scott Dorman

  Just a quick reminder that the June 2009 meeting is tonight from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (ET) at the Microsoft office. Please be sure to register so we have a good idea of how much pizza to order. Enterprise Architecture What is it? Why is it important? An overview of Enterprise Architecture as a discipline, its principles, methods, frameworks and tools. This session will explore the growing role and importance of enterprise architecture in the management of organizations.

• Getting a custom attribute

  Posted: 08 Jun 2009 at 18:31 by Scott Dorman

  Attribute programming has a lot of benefits and, when done correctly, can greatly simplify the amount of code that you need to write. One drawback to using attributes is that the code required to retrieve a custom attribute from a type is a bit cumbersome and is very repetitious. Given a type, the simplest way to retrieve a custom attribute is code like CustomAttribute attribute = Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(customType.GetType(), typeof(CustomAttribute), true) as CustomAttribute;

• Windows 7 Bing Search Connector

  Posted: 01 Jun 2009 at 17:16 by Scott Dorman

  Microsoft’s latest incarnation of it’s search engine, which has gone by a few different code names, is live a few days early. It’s still early, so it remains to be seen if Microsoft will be able to pull any search market share away from Google, but Bing looks like it may be a good start. The biggest difference is that Bing seems to offer better organization by putting the related searches list along the left side of the search results where you can see it without scrolling.

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

  Posted: 18 May 2009 at 13:55 by Scott Dorman

  I’m still waiting for an “official” announcement, but if you are an MSDN subscriber you will be able to download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 later today (May 18), probably around 12:00 PM (PST). If you aren’t an MSDN subscriber, you will be able to download Beta 1 on May 20 through Microsoft Downloads. Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010

• Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane

  Posted: 16 May 2009 at 21:18 by Scott Dorman

  Windows 7 includes a lot of improvements in the Windows Explorer. Most of them are fairly obvious, but the new preview pane is likely to go unnoticed (or passed over as the same as Vista’s preview pane) by a lot of people. The new preview pane supports a much wider range of formats than the Windows XP and Windows Vista preview pane did, including the ability to preview HTML, text files, XML files, images, videos, music, and WordPad files without any additional software installed.

• Windows 7 Search Connectors

  Posted: 15 May 2009 at 03:07 by Scott Dorman

  Earlier I talked about the new Windows 7 Federated Search capabilities and mentioned that you can create your own Search connectors. Since then, I’ve been busy creating some search connector description files for the following sites: Geekswithblogs Live Search MSDN MSDN Blogs The Code Project Channel 9 Twitter All of these search connector descriptions are available from my SkyDrive Search Connectors folder. Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Federated Search,OpenSearch

• Windows 7 Federated Search

  Posted: 14 May 2009 at 23:01 by Scott Dorman

  Windows and the Windows Explorer have had search capabilities for a long time and they have gradually improved over the years. The one thing that was always lacking was an ability to search different contexts (or remote sources). There were some improvements with the Windows Desktop search, but I think the federated search capability in Windows 7 really gets it right.

• Windows 7 Tricks and Keyboard Shortcuts

  Posted: 11 May 2009 at 01:28 by Scott Dorman

  I’ve been running Windows 7 RC for a little over a week now and can’t imagine going back to Vista at this point. I decided to start with a fresh install of Windows 7, so I’ve been in the process of reinstalling all of my applications and cleaning up my disk drives. In the process, I went searching to see if there are any interesting Windows 7 power toys or tricks available. While I didn’t find any power toys, I did discover that all of the Windows Vista tricks are still available on Windows 7.

• Windows 7 Release Candidate

  Posted: 30 Apr 2009 at 13:07 by Scott Dorman

  Microsoft has reached a critical milestone in the Windows 7 development cycle with the limited release of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) today for Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers and general availability from the Microsoft Download Center on May 5th. There has been a lot of excitement about Windows 7 and, so far, the excitement has been justified. The Windows 7 RC comes after extensive beta testing and feedback from the MVP community with a lot of enhancements and bug fixes since th

• Microsoft Fix it Solution for Disappearing System Tray Icons on Windows Vista

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 14:07 by Scott Dorman

  About two years ago I talked about a very common problem in Windows Vista where the network, volume, and power icons in the system tray disappear. In that post, I provide a solution which involves editing the registry. Several people posted comments that provide slightly more automated ways to make the registry changes through a batch/command file and through a registry file. Jump ahead to today and Microsoft has a Fix it solution for this problem. Fix this problem Technorati Tags: Fix it,Vista

• Microsoft Fix it

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 13:55 by Scott Dorman

  It seems Microsoft has always had a love/hate relationship with consumers when it comes to support issues. When things are going well the general public loves Microsoft, but when things start going badly public opinion heads the same direction. For whatever reason, the Microsoft Help and Support website seems to be one of the last places a lot of people turn to for an actual resolution. One of the problems has always been that the solutions presented require more than simple knowledge about how

• Upcoming Code Camps for the South East (April 2009 Update)

  Posted: 04 Apr 2009 at 16:12 by Scott Dorman

  I’m trying to put together the list of upcoming code camps in the South East region. The plan is for this to be periodically (probably quarterly) updated so, if you are hosting a code camp (or know someone who is) in the South East, please let me know the date and website so I can include it in the list. (I’m also using this list to plan my speaking schedule, so if I don’t know about your code camp I can’t determine if it will fit my schedule.)   I only know of a few, so if you know of others pl

• Florida Technical Communities (April 2009 Update)

  Posted: 04 Apr 2009 at 15:51 by Scott Dorman

  Florida has a very active developer community. The biggest problem we seem to have is that all of these different groups usually don't know about each and there hasn't been a "centralized clearinghouse" listing all of the technical communities. Joe Healy, one of our Florida Microsoft Developer Evangelists, maintains a list and one-page flyers for each of the main areas in Florida. I think the eventual plan is that Joe will be updating his site to take advantage of the newer version of Live Maps

• New blog title

  Posted: 04 Mar 2009 at 00:47 by Scott Dorman

  Ever since I started this blog it hasn't really had a title (or at least a subtitle) other than “blog”. Thanks to Stan Schultes, I now have a new subtitle. This was born out of watching the CLR 4 Futures talk with Joshua Goodman at MVP Summit 2009 (the majority of which is also available from the PDC 2008 site on Channel 9). Since I present a lot on .NET memory management, including a deep dive on how the GC works and how to properly implement IDisposable and the dispose pattern, he suggested th

• Code Contracts in .NET

  Posted: 02 Mar 2009 at 23:44 by Scott Dorman

  I have previously talked about code contracts in .NET 4.0, and while .NET 4.0 isn’t out yet you can work with them now in Visual Studio 2008 through MSDN DevLabs. In case you aren’t familiar with code contracts in .NET, this is a feature that was actually built by the .NET CLR team to provide a language-agnostic way to express code assumptions in the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. There are currently two tools provided: Runtime Checking, which uses a binary rewr

• MVP Summit 2009 Twitters

  Posted: 01 Mar 2009 at 22:45 by Scott Dorman

  If you’re at MVP Summit 2009 (or not at Summit) and trying to find people to follow I’ve started putting together a list of MVPs that I know who are here. Everyone should be using the #mvp09 hashtag for their tweets, so you can follow the conversations using #hashtags, Twitter Search, Twopular, TweetScan, or any other twitter search sites. If you want to be included in this list (or have updates to your information), leave a comment and I’ll add you.   Who? Twitter Blog Location Scott Dorman

• Tampa Bay IASA February 2009 Meeting Reminder

  Posted: 26 Feb 2009 at 15:44 by Scott Dorman

  Just a quick reminder that the February 2009 meeting is tonight from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (ET) at the Microsoft office. Please be sure to register so we have a good idea of how much pizza to order. Code Generation with T4 and Visual Studio Why write repetitive code when you can generate it? Learn about Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) - one of the best-hidden new features of Visual Studio 2008. T4 allows you to use simple ASP.NET-like template syntax to generate application source code, co

• South Florida Code Camp 2009

  Posted: 15 Feb 2009 at 01:59 by Scott Dorman

  I wanted to thank Dave and everyone else who helped coordinate the South Florida Code Camp this year. It was an excellent event and I believe the final number of attendees was a little over 700, which makes this the largest known code camp in the world. For those of you who attended my sessions, thank you as well. As I mentioned, the complete list of resources for my two-part memory management session is available as well as the blog posts that are related to my Code Style and Standards chalk ta

• Visual Studio 2008 Debugging – The Watch Window

  Posted: 15 Feb 2009 at 01:23 by Scott Dorman

  The Watch window (actually there are four different Watch windows you can use) is easily the most powerful aspect of the Visual Studio debugger and the underlying technology it uses actually surfaces in several places: Watch Autos Locals Quick Watch “Data Tips” (the debugging tool tips that appear when you hover over a code element) The thing that most people might not realize is that you can actually call methods in the Watch window. This is useful because it allows you to see data structures