The XML Serializer built into the .Net framework is a pretty cool side-utility when working with anything that consumes XML. A few years ago I posted about how your should Make your XML strongly-typed: Because you can and it’s easy in which I discussed how easy and awesome it is to use the XSD.exe tool to quickly convert an XML file into a XSD and then further covnert into a Serializable c# class file. The only not-so-perfect part of using the XML Serializer is that it by default adds namespace and schema attributes that point at the W3C standard declarations – but it’s just as easy to remove these so your resulting XML looks perfectly like your original XML file.

Microsoft SQL Server's Profiler is a necessity when digging around on a SQL server trying to find any bottlenecks or long running queries. How you personally lock down your profiling session to show only your application's data access appears, from the experience of looking over others' shoulders as well as how I personally go about it, to be a "how you taught yourself one day when first debugging queries". Like most things in dev-land someone had this problem WAY before you and there is a final, easy solution.

One of the subtleties I've found recently while working with the Windows Phone 7 SDK is found when working with the ApplicationBar programmatically. There are a number of differences that the ApplicationBar has when compared to a normal Windows Phone 7 Silverlight control – these very differences can be really frustrating if you are not aware of them as they stop you from interacting with it in the same way you do other Silverlight controls. Hopefully after we’ve taken a closer look it will make sense why they are so.

When updating a project’s Database Schema as part of your deployment strategy, you want to automate as much of the process as possible to avoid human errors. If you have a Visual Studio Premium installed on your build server, generating schema update scripts is easy to achieve with the built-in database tools that the IDE contains. I will show you how to do this easily and also automatically deploy the changes to your destination server with the awesomeness of TeamCity.

Just a quick note for today: Early next month I will be attending DDD Sydney at UTS Sydney on the 2nd and 3rd July, and would like to invite you to do the same. If you are a .Net developer who is interested in one of the best priced conferences for people in your industry, this event is just for you.

Often when using built-in ASP.Net WebForm Caching to speed up a page’s output time, people feel pigeon holed into either caching the whole page, or setting up output caching for the majority of controls on the page individually. An often overlooked approach is to use the Subsitution control. This allows you to have your cake and eat it too by caching the whole page, and yet still updating a part of the page on every load.

Web Creatives like Black. There is no denying it. Every where i have worked where a graphic designer has had involvement in the creative process of a website, black has always been an early option. Nearly any text you throw on this magical colour will have bad readability in comparison to a dark-on-light approach, and yet designers keep plugging away… Maybe its got something to do with the tools they are creating these designs with; The Apple iMac.

When working with different iterations of a SQL database running on Internal, Staging and Production infrastructure it can become a pain in the ass rolling out updates at deployment time or keeping them in sync. Developers often use third party tools to help them do this job, however depending on what version of Visual Studio you have installed, there may be another option you have overlooked, and it’s baked right into the IDE.

One of the first things i was frustrated by when i first started using the distributed source control Git on windows was creating a .gitignore file as i couldn’t only ever seem to figure it out using the command line – but today i found an interesting hack.

One of the most annoying things I find when i start working with a fresh installation of Visual Studio 2010 is that when implementing interfaces and base classes using the “Implement Interface X” function (CTRL + period) it inserts those crappy #region tags.