Welcome to Imar.Spaanjaars.Com

A while ago (actually a long while ago but I didn't have the time to post this earlier), I was approached by Amanda Myer with a question about comparing and sorting BusinessBase objects in collections that inherit BusinessCollectionBase, discussed in my article series on N-Layer design in .NET 3.5.

I am working on an application that ships with documentation in the form of a Windows Compiled Help file. To build the help file I use Sandcastle and the excellent Sandcastle Help File Builder. Building the help file is part of a continuous integration plan so the help file is always up to date.

I was pleasantly surprised when the other day I received a package containing three copies of my book Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 - in Hebrew!

Due to some confusion and delays at the publisher, I ended up with two review copies of Professional Enterprise .NET by Jon Arking and Scott Millett, the book I recently reviewed on this web site.

Prior to reading Professional Enterprise .NET by Jon Arking and Scott Millett, I read Scott's Wrox Blox titled "NHibernate with ASP.NET Problem–Design–Solution" which I found to be an excellent introduction to using NHibernate. If you haven't read that eBook yet, and you're interested in learning NHibernate, check it out at the Wrox web site; at a price of under 10 dollar, it's money very well spent. Considering Scott's writing style and the depth of information found in the Blox, I was having high expectations of the book Professional Enterprise .NET. Having read it now, I can say I am certainly not disappointed.

Some of the Login controls that ship with ASP.NET, such as CreateUserWizard, ChangePassword and PasswordRecovery enable you to send e-mail to your users without writing a lot of code. You just drag and drop a control, assign a mail body template and you're pretty much done. However, as soon as your mail server requires you to use SSL (as, for example, GMail does), things become a little trickier. In this short article I'll show the code and configuration needed to send mail to servers that require SSL.

I meant to announce my new project earlier, but once again, Amazon and the official Wiley site beat me to it.

Together with beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 - Microsoft's team collaboration platform for team portals, version control, work-item tracking, build management, process guidance, and business intelligence. Previously, TFS required a very expensive license and as such was only affordable by larger companies.

Woohoo, I've received the MVP Award again....

Before I launched my web site www.dotnetattributes.com in early 2009 I generated most of the content automatically using reflection and web look ups. I extracted all the various attributes from .NET assemblies using the Managed GAC API Wrappers and I extracted a lot of class details and documentation from the MSDN site using the HttpWebRequest class. One thing I hadn't automated at first and was planning to do manually using Visual Studio was generating class diagrams. However, soon after the first full import attempt I ended up with more than 1,200 attributes so manually creating the diagrams suddenly did not seem so attractive anymore.