.NET
Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t display XML files with the UTF-16 encoding
Recently, while working on a new tool for converting XML files using XSLT I have noticed something odd: Visual Studio (VS) 2008 wouldn’t display the contents of the converted XML files!
How to do it: RSS aggregation (merging multiple XML files using XSLT)
In my previous article I have presented you a little test case I have made for testing the performance of various data merging approaches. Using an XSLT based method turned out to be the best performing way of merging multiple XML files.
Performance of various data merging methods
Recently I got the task to develop a Web Part which would aggregate the contents of a couple of RSS Feeds, sort them descending on the publishing date and display the top n of them. Thinking about how the whole thing could be done, I have found out that there are multiple methods to get things done. The Web Part was supposed to work on an Internet site so I decided to have a closer look at the performance of the various methods.
Render parent control to string snippet
While working with Control Adapters in either ASP.NET or SharePoint 2007 you will quite often want to intercept the output of the parent control and modify it before rendering. As retrieving the output is the same for each and every control I have created the following code snippet:
ExtensionAttribute Visual Studio Item Template
Extension Methods are a new feature of Visual Studio 2008. They basically allow you to add new methods to already existing classes. You could for example introduce a new method: String.IsValidEmailAddress() which would validate whether the given string is a valid e-mail address. Scott Guthrie has written some more information about the Extension Methods in Visual Studio 2008.