It is very common to use resource files in .Net applications when you need to store some data in a XML file. I usually use .resx files as string tables in order to avoid hard coded strings in my code. Two months ago, we published a post about a free tool which helps to extract hard coded strings to resource files. Notice that when you add a resource file, there is an automatically generated class with properties issued from the resources elements, so you can call this class properties instead of using the ResourceManager. The only problem with this class is that its properties are marked as internal and thus can’t be accessed externally (from other assemblies).

This is a guest post written by John Daniel-Trask from Mindscape.

Mindscape have released a major upgrade to their LightSpeed domain modelling / ORM tool. Version 2.0 includes a visual model designer integrated into Visual Studio, LINQ support, and the ability to access multiple databases concurrently. LightSpeed is a small, fast domain modeling tool which uses convention over configuration to perform object-relational mapping without the need for complex mapping files.

In the past it’s been necessary to code LightSpeed models explicitly in C# or Visual Basic, but the new Visual Studio-hosted designer enables a more data-centric approach: developers can drag tables from Server Explorer and LightSpeed automatically creates the models for them. Developers can also add validations and tune performance parameters such as caching and lazy/eager loading through the designer. The designer also supports a “round-tripping” approach whereby changes to the database can be applied incrementally to the…

Every one of us, software developers, experienced situations where the .Net Framework could not locate an assembly and ended up facing the TypeLoadException. These failures usually happen due to an assembly deployed to the wrong location or a mismatch in version numbers or cultures. A quick way to check what went wrong is to open the module window (Visual Studio) during debugging but that may be sometimes impossible or inconvenient because:

• We may not have Visual Studio installed. 
• We installed the product in the customer site and we don’t have the code available.
• It is some third party assemblies which causes the problems.

Luckily, there is an assembly binding log viewer which displays information that helps us diagnose why the .NET Framework can not locate an assembly at run time. This tool is called

Here are two interesting tools I found while working on our Silveredo 2 theme.

Install Multiple Internet Explorer Versions

This one is quite helpful and a must if you are working and building themes. Usually you want your theme to be compatible with FF2/3 and IE7 which we all know has its issues…

I bet there are many people who want their site to be compatible with Internet Explorer 6 too, having IE6 and IE7 working together on your windows is a problem, as it turns out, you CAN have all the Internet Explorer versions working along side each other, all you have to do is to download the multiple IE version installer and install any version you need.

In this post I do not intend to make a list of the best programmers web sites, but to share with you some you might not know:

CodeFetch - Search for source code in programming books. Their mission is to connect programmers with authors and is uses and support open source. If we are talking about code search I am sure you are familiar with Koders - top search engine for code.

FreeTechBooks - Free Online Computer Science and Programming Books, Textbooks, and Lecture Notes.

QuickRef - interactive programming documentation, allows you to keep many docs and remember them.

In my last post about 5 Firefox plugin’s any web developer needs I got hammered for not posting FireBug. I admit that FireBug is Amazing and I use it often, but anyone knows FireBug, so posting about it is a bit pointless. My aim was to shed some light on some less known plugins, and therefore today’s post will not include FireBug again

lets start then:

We all know the propertyGrid control, which provides a user interface for browsing the properties of an object. What about having a WPF propertyGrid? Well, yesterday I  noticed that there is a work in progress on an open source WPF property grid. Tomer Shamam announced in his blog Essential WPF that he accepted Microsoft Israel OPEN UP challenge (open source contest) and created a new project - WPF property grid. As he stated, it is currently only a Proof of concept and the interface and its usage may change in next releases. I think that its worth tracking…

Recently I found out this great add-on for Visual Studio 2008 called PowerCommands. PowerCommands Extends the functionality of Visual Studio 2008 by adding some features which we all want built into Visual Studio. PowerCommands provides the following:

My favorite: Copy Reference, very useful indeed, and you all know it, just right click on the reference you [...]

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, for those who are not familiar with this language - here are the W3C specifications and here is the W3schools tutorial. Now that we know XPath, lets get to the point of that post which is - Visual XPath.

This is a free graphical XPath [...]