Monthly Archives: January 2010

How to use SSL transport security using a certificate in your WCF hosted service…

So you want to use some channel security in your WCF service. Maybe you even want to guarantee the server your are talking to is who they say they are. Well, transport security is what you are looking for. It is really quite easy to implement. Things you will need: 1) A certificate from a […]

How to read the Distributed Transaction Coordinator settings from C#…

I wrote a nice helper utility class for reading the settings from the MSDTC in .NET.  My WCF service requires distributed transactions, so I want to make sure my server was able detect if it was on. If its not, I throw an error and shutdown. So, here is the class for your pleasure. using […]

How to make your own SSL test certificate for IIS or WCF

I had to create a test ssl certificate to use with my WCF service. Here is the simple way to do it in 2 Easy Steps! 1) Open the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt 2) Fire off this command. change bseekford00111 to your computer name or whatever name you want the certificate to be. makecert […]

Copy one List to another List in one line of code using Linq and lambdas!

I find it pretty useful to try and incorporate time and code line saving features where it is beneficial to my productivity and the code readability. One thing I need to do often is convert lists from one type to another. Here is a one liner to convert an object with a VendorID property on […]

Really cool and free screen shot clipping tool. How handy!

I imagine everyone writing on the web or developing software needs to do a screen shot every once in a while. I also don’t want to pay $30 for something I only use every once in a while. So I ran across this cool project from CodePlex. It is called Cropper. http://cropper.codeplex.com/ You can give […]

Enterprise Library Caching Block. Contains or to not Contains, that is the question!

I am working on a project where a few developers decided to use the Caching block in an interesting way. The code I saw was basically: if(cache.Contains[MyKey]) return cache.GetData(MyKey); fill cache code…. Contains….hmmm. Sounds innocent, right? You do it with a Dictionary. This code will work, granted not optimally, but works OK if you always […]

The cost of a code freeze and maybe a better way of doing it.

The cost of a code freeze So you’re thinking about doing a code freeze in your company, or maybe you already are. This article discusses the pros and cons and potential solutions to the common pitfalls. A “code freeze” is general the period of time in which developers of a team based software development project […]

Using a LINQ compiled query to determine if a record exists with the Entity Framework

I am writing an application that requires high performance on the server layer. The method I am calling will be invoked a large number of times, so I don’t want the overhead of the LINQ compile every time I invoke it. Yes, the compile is very expensive. It is especially so when called a large […]