Wednesday, June 23, 2004

10 Must have tools for .Net programming

Another one that I haven't read yet, but it looks like a definite must read.

The article covers the following:


  • NUnit to write unit tests

  • NDoc to create code documentation

  • NAnt to build your solutions

  • CodeSmith to generate code

  • FxCop to police your code

  • Snippet Compiler to compile small bits of code

  • Two different switcher tools, the ASP.NET Version Switcher and the Visual Studio .NET Project

  • Converter

  • Regulator to build regular expressions

  • .NET Reflector to examine assemblies


Friday, June 11, 2004

Delphi and .net site

I need to go through this guy's site (maybe "page" is more appropriate) in more detail. He's not actually talking about Delphi .net (ie Delphi 8), he's talking about communication between Delphi for win32 (ie: 7 or below) and .net apps.


(open the site in a new window)

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Delphi .net ASP.NET tip #2

A basic ASP.NET installation tip...

If you install the .Net framework, then install IIS on the same box afterwards, you'll have issues. Specifically, IIS wont understand your funky .net jive... damn, man! But you can fix it. Just run the following command at the prompt and everything will be funkylicious!

%comspec% /K %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

Delphi .net ASP.NET tip #1

Normally when you go to deploy a Delphi based ASP.net app, you need to deploy a bunch of borland dlls with it, at least Borland.Delphi.dll, and say for bdp based SQL Server apps you need Borland.Data.Common.dll, Borland.Data.MSSQL.dll, and Borland.Data.Provider.dll (you also need to put bdpmss15.dll in your system folder for the SQL driver, bummer ey?).

If you don't use any of the Borland components, just use the .net data components, then you don't need these dlls (which isn't clear from Borland's deployment instructions).

So you can write an ASP.net app against SQL server, and only need the following on deployment to a windows box:


  • The .net framework

  • IIS installed

  • MDAC 2.6 or later



Easy!

Friday, June 04, 2004

Out of the blind alley

Having had to clean up after my own and other people's software messes on many occassions, one of my fundamental programming rules is that Less Code is Good. That doesn't mean I like crazy app-in-one-line obfuscated perl scripting stupidity; I temper it with Simple is Good, which often means more code, as long as it's stupider, and so easier to understand. But generally I prefer components, libraries, etc, to buckets of code.

Along these lines, it's always my preference to use data-aware controls where they can be profitably used. So, in this spirit I jumped into Delphi .Net, swallowed the line that Falafel was putting out, and went for bdp and DBWeb components.

Well, they suck. I tried, I failed, and I'm willing to blaim anyone but myself, so I'm going to declare those components to be shit. They really suck, they would be fabulous for demos but you can't make real software out of them.

...

Anyway, I'm now using non-data aware methods, and they work just fine. Sad but true. Lots of code to write, unfortunately, but that's the way it goes. It's pretty straightforward code, so hey.

Ambrose .Net

This site looks useful, not Delphi related though.