Some of the ASP.NET 4 improvements around SEO are neat. The ASP.NET 4 Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties, for example, are a welcomed change. There’s nothing earth-shattering going on here – you can now set these meta tags via your Master page’s code behind rather than relying on updates to your markup alone. It isn’t difficult [...]
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I hadn’t done much (read: anything) with the C# generic HashSet until I recently needed to produce a distinct collection. As it turns out, HashSet<T> was the perfect tool.
As the following snippet demonstrates, this collection type offers a lot:
// Using HashSet<T>:
// http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/ch07.aspx
var letters = new HashSet<char>("the quick brown fox");
Console.WriteLine(letters.Contains('t')); // true
Console.WriteLine(letters.Contains('j')); // false
foreach (char c [...]
As an icebreaker question, I’ve asked several interviewees to name classes that one might find in the System.Collections namespace. There a quite a few answers to this questions – especially if you start to explore the System.Collections.Specialized namespace. Though I completely understand why folks might immediately shout out answers like Hashtable, Stack, Queue or ArrayList, [...]
It doesn’t take much to hack together email functionality using the .NET framework. In most cases you can new-up a MailMessage reference, assign sender and recipient addresses, provide a subject and a message body, configure your SMTP settings and then send. Done and done.
But let’s say you need to provide both plain text and HTML [...]
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I read through Jeffrey Richter’s CLR via C# not too long ago. This evening I cracked it open again and jotted down a few notes on what I personally took away from the book. Of course, if I spent the time to write down everything I learned, I might still be busy writing. I’ve thrown [...]
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I think everyone is familiar with those short urls which are being passed around in applications like Twitter. It’s pretty neat that there are dozens of services willing to shorten urls for us, but what about lengthening them? That’s where longurlplease.com comes in. As they say, they promote safer and productive browsing by lengthening short [...]
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.NET Strings are immutable. StringBuilder should be used to better performance. Blah… Blah… Blah… You’ve heard it all before, but what you might not know is how StringBuilder dynamically allocates its capacity. The simple answer is StringBuilder will double its capacity when its capacity is reached. In other words, if you add 1 byte to [...]
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jTemplates is a jQuery plugin and template engine for Javascript. If you keep up with Dave Ward and/or Rick Strahl you may already be familiar with jTemplates as they have both highlighted the plugin on their respective bolgs. About 1.5 months ago, however, I got into the action and started using jTemplates in conjunction with [...]
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