VB.Net’s My.Settings and custom objects/classes; Part One: requirements for your class

This article is the culmination of many months’ struggle, on and off, with using a somewhat complex object/class I wrote to store user settings into VB.Net’s My.Settings permanent storage provider. The information required to do so is out there, but it’s fragmented and often contradictory, and some articles/forum posts contain inaccuracies; so I set out [...]

Website re-design

Just a quick note: The re-design of my website is live at: http://www.cushen.com! Currently listening to: The Replacements – "Johnny’s Gonna Die"

Fixing Strong Name password Errors

Strong name key file password "incorrect"; "specified network password is not correct" This has happened to me twice in the last six months, and I keep forgetting the incredibly simple fix, so I’m posting it here, both for my own use, and in the hope that I can help someone else. Here’s the scenario: you [...]

How-to: Setting up Mono on Mac OS X, Part Three

Part 3 of a series; see Part Two here Continued from Part Two The actual problem, and its solution After spending way too much time on a wild goose chase, it finally occurred to me to do what I should have done in the first place: hit the Mono website harder for a solution. I [...]

How-to: Setting up Mono on Mac OS X, Part Two

Part 2 of a series; see Part One here Continued from Part One: At this point, follow the same process to install the CSDK, starting with the .dmg file, which is named in the same pattern. In my case, it was named: monoframework-csdk-2.6.1_1.macos10.novell.ppc.dmg. double-click it, double-click the resulting  drive icon, double-click the .pkg file…you know [...]

How to: Using Microsoft’s FxCop tool with VB.Net

Sadly, it just seems to be the case lately that those of us attempting to use VB.Net to write professional applications, in a professional manner, using up-to-date tools, and best practices, are swimming upstream against the current. Whether trying out the latest tool from Microsoft (I’m looking at you, StyleCop), the latest Test-Driven/agile development approach, [...]

Using Rhino.Mocks 3.5-and-up with VB.NET 9

Choosing a Mocking Framework Lately I have been getting a bit more serious about Unit Testing, dipping my toe in the Test-Driven Development pool. In reading up on the subject, I came across the concept of using mocking frameworks to dynamically and automatically create stub- and mock- objects. i began looking into the various frameworks [...]

How-to: Setting up Mono on Mac OS X, Part One

I was recently bequeathed a somewhat older, PowerPC-based G5 Mac running OS X 10.4.11. Being a .Net programmer, one of the first things I thought of, spurred by memories of a code magazine article from the May-June 2009 issue, was to install Mono, the project that allows .Net code to run of various flavors of [...]

Web Service “content type” Error using Visual Studio 2008

This is obvious in retrospect, but I am blogging this in case anyone else comes across the same problem.   When writing my first VS 2008 Windows Forms app that used a Web Service, after adding the service reference and the code to talk to it, I repeatedly received the following error: The content type [...]

Update on Tools post: problems with CVS in Visual Studio

  UPDATE: I have lately become disenchanted with the source control combination noted in my earlier post: A Random sampling of tools I use with VS2005 when coding web pages. Since writing that post, I have experienced various issues with the Visual Studio integration, one of which cost me a week-and-a-half of development time and [...]