El día viernes 29, a las 18.30 hs estaremos haciendo el evento de promoción de Gaming para los colegios técnicos de Capital Federal en el auditorio del colegio Esteban Echeverría (San Juan 983, Capital Federal).

Se darán algunas charlas, y se responderán consultas sobre el concurso.

Espero verlos ahi!

No, this is not a post about that old problem with the same name, this is about a new Website

I've been beta testing for a few days Jeff Atwood's new venture, and I must say, it's promising. It is a site made and maintained by programmers, for programmers... kind of like a wikipedia meets experts-exchange, but free.

The beta is supposed to end at the end of the month, so that means that it will open to the general public (at least that's the current rumor) next month.

In the meantime, here are some screenshots

I have migrated my feed to Google, so if you are subscribed to the old feedburner address through google reader or any other feed program, please update the adress to http://feedproxy.google.com/juanformoso

The old one will continue to work, but the new one is preferred.

I wanted some easy way to add modules to a website of mine, and have it automatically generate the menu, so I thought I'd compile some existing ideas and code I found into something useful for that end.

In short, what I wanted to do is have a Sitemap generated based on the folders in the application.

First, armed with what I learned about HttpHandlers, I created one to do just that: search folders and .aspx files and create the sitemap as needed by the XmlSiteMapProvider. It hooks to sitemap.axd and outputs the xml.
You can download that code at the end of this article, just drop it in the App_Code folder.

The target format is this

<siteMap>
  <siteMapNode title="RootNode" description="This is the root node of the site map. There can be only one root node." url="Page1.aspx" >
    <siteMapNode title="ChildofRootNode" description="Descriptions do not have to be unique." url="Page2.aspx">
      <siteMapNode title="ChildOfChildNode" description="SiteMapNode objects can be nested to any level." url="Page3.aspx"/>
    </siteMapNode>
    <siteMapNode title="ChildofRootNode" description="Descriptions do not have to be unique." url="Page4.aspx"/>
  </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

The first problem I run into was that the .NET provider didn't like two things, the extension (.axd) and the fact that the file doesn't really exists, as can be seen quickly using Reflector.

(...)

After thinking for a bit, I decided to implement my own SiteMapProvider, luckily one already existed.

I used Stefan Sedich's code, removed the dynamic node part, and modified the way it looks for the file (which was to map the physical path, but as I said earlier, the file doesn't exist) like this:

This way, the HttpHandler takes the request, and outputs the sitemap xml.

The result is that for this sample web site:

This xml is generated:

There's also configuration entry in the web.config file to exclude specific folders in the search, nothing too fancy:

So with this, whenever I add a subfolder in my application, it will automatically appear in the Menu, SiteMapPath, or whatever control that uses the sitemap.

I hope this is useful to someone

Downloads
SiteMap.cs (4.28 kb)

One of the new features that came with Visual Studio .NET 2008 SP1, is the real-time compiler errors (feature I read VB developers have had for a long time).

So if you type something wrong, you see it without having to compile

I've been working with it for two days, and I definitely don't like it, it distracts me to have errors appearing and disappearing all the time, it doesn't even let you finish writing the line, it shows an error when there isn't one (I just need to finish the line please!). I found myself trying to type faster to avoid seeing the "error".

I'm sure they had good intentions.

Luckily, almost anything can be turned off, you just need to find it.

If you go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced, and uncheck "Show live semantic errors", it works like before, only showing hints

I will go back to the old ways with this one...

Gaming.NET tiene grupo en Facebook!

Pueden verlo haciendo click acá

La idea es canalizar dudas del juego por ahí, a modo de foro (que es mejor que el de la página oficial dicho sea de paso, nunca conseguí que me lo cambien =) )

No es obligatorio para participar

Es de mi agrado informarles que están confirmados los cursos (si, plural, van a ser 2) que se dictaran en la Universidad de Palermo para Gaming.NET 2008

Las fechas son

Curso 1

6, 13, 20 y 27 de septiembre (de 10:00 a 13:00 hs)

Curso 2

4, 11,18 y 25 de octubre (de 10:00 a 13:00 hs)

La inscripción se realiza a través de la web de gaming, y ya está abierta!

Espero verlos ahí 

You can download the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 from here (which includes the .NET 3.5 SP1)

Following those links you have the information regarding what fixes and new features they bring

The ASP.NET new features include

Enjoy!

The internal framework we are developing here at Iceberg includes a Lock Manager.

All it does is keep a record of the status of objects (that generally represent records in a table), so you can know if it can be modified (i.e. it's not locked).

The basic design includes a Lock(obj) method and an UnLock(obj) method. However, the possibility exists for the application to end abruptly, or even for the programmer to forget to call UnLock to free the object's exclusive lock.

The first approach to solve this was to have the object register itself to a Ping event in the Lock Manager, so it can tell it it's still alive. The problem was that since it's registered in the Lock Manager's event, it was never garbage collected, ergo, it was always alive.

After a few more ideas that ranged from looking for some reference count (and finding it doesn't exist) to considering manipulating the memory through unsafe code, I found the most beautiful class in the world: WeakReference

A weak reference allows the garbage collector to collect an object while still allowing an application to access the object. If you need the object, you can still obtain a strong reference to it and prevent it from being collected. For more information about how to use short and long weak references, see Weak References.

With 2 lines of code you can solve the problem:

It's magic!

Currently the Lock Manager creates a Weak Reference in the Lock method and ads it to a list, it has an internal timer where it iterates through the list, and it unlocks every object that was garbage collected.

You should've seen the test application go... this is by far the best class in the .NET Framework.

I wanted to create a template web site with the ability to completely change its layout via the web.config file, and it was also a good excuse to look into HttpModules.

HttpModules are services that execute when the requests reach the webserver, you can use them to do whatever you want... like compressing the output before sending it to the client, parsing scripts and put them all in a single file, etc, etc, etc

This time, what I want to do is set the the page's MasterPage according to a value in the web.config file.

What I do is register for the page's PreInit method, and set the MasterPageFile property in the handler, like this:

In that example, you have to have a MaterPageTheme setting with the name of the folder that contains site.master.

Then you just need to register the module, and you are good to go

<httpModules>

You can download the code below, just drop it in the App_Code folder

MasterPageModule.zip (620.00 bytes)