http://sourcemaking.com/ - a very cool website to learn Design Patterns, AntiPatterns and Refactoring. Check it out. You will simply love it.

I wrote a new article on  - More on Unit Testing : TestContext in my blog in weblogs.asp.net . In that article , you can see what is TestContext of VSTS unit testing framework and how you can use TestContext  to leverage writing effective unit tests for your application in different scenerios ranging from normal unit test to Data Driven and Asp.net unit test.

Don’t forget to check it out. I would really appreciate any comments or suggestion related to this topic.

“One Picture’s  Worth Thousands Words”

If you are also fond of changing the look and feel of Visual Studio using cools themes, here is some cool links for you -

1. A list of Cool themes in Scott Hanselman’s blog
2. Dark Visual Studio
3. ZenBurn-based Visual Studio 2005 theme supporting HTML,CSS and XML
4. Join the Dark Side of Visual Studio by Dave Reed
5. TextMate Theme For Visual Studio, Take 2

How to change your Visual Studio 2008 Theme -

1. Changing your colors in Visual Studio.NET - Black versus White By Scott Hanselman
2. Dark Visual Studio - By Brad Wilson
3. Pimp MY IDE by Jeff Atwood
4. Code Colorizing and readability by Jeff Atwood

Download LInks -

1. Download Jeff’s scheme
2. Download “Zenburn” scheme
3. OrenEllenbogen_DarkSchema.rar (58 KB)
4. Is You IDE HOT or Not?

How to change your themes :

Step - 1 : Click on the Import And Export Settings :

Step -2:  Select Import Selected Environment settings and click on Next

Step -3: You get the option to save your current setting. I would suggest to save it.

Step-4: Click Browse and select the *.vssettings file and click Next -

Step-5: Check the boxes the setting you want to change and click finish. You are done with you brand new theme.

If any error occurs or you dont feel like using your new theme, you can always get back to your old setting by getting upto Step4 and setting your themes to import is the one you saved in step - 3 -

And you also have the option to reset all the settings [Step-1].

Have fun with the themes.

Scott Hanselman posted a very useful list of tools that we might use in our life (Just to make it little bit easier) according to our needs. Check out the cool tools for developers and power users in Scott Hanselman’s Blog.  I am sure that you wont be surprised to see many of your favorites ones’ there in the list.

Sometimes while working with image, it become necessary to get all the properties of an image. This time, I had to find out all the properties of an Image deployed in a web site.Its interesting- that’s why I wanted to share the small code snippet. For our today’s example - let’s pick this gif from our favorite google.com -

We will find out all the properties from the Image URL.

Something About Bitmap Class of System.Drawing -

It represents the pixel data of the graphics image as GDI+ Bitmap and expose all the attributes related to the Image Graphics. In addition to that, it enables manipulation of the Bitmap and save it as File in different format.

There are many overloaded Constructor in the Bitmap class  which enables to create image object in various way at developers convenience.

Using WebRequest and WebResponse class of we can retrieve the Stream of the Image.

string url = "http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif";  

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "Get";  

WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream();

And then we can just initialize a Bitmap object with the stream that we have just retrieved from the URL.

Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(stream);

We are done. We can access all the properties exposed by the Bitmap object representing the Image Graphics -

In this post, we will see how to pass parameter to a method representing Predicate. 

Let’s say, we have a collection of SprintBacklogItems and we want to filter all the SprintBacklogItem with Title start’s with, let say “QA” or “Dev Task” depending on a input parameter. Now from the previous post http://adilakhter.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/using-predicate-actor-of-net20/  we know that , predicate only have 1 parameter of type T.

Then, how to pass a input parameter _HeaderToSearch in Predicate?

1. To do that, we need to a new object called ListMatcher -

public class ListMatcher
   {
       private string _HeaderToSearch;
       public ListMatcher(string headerToSearch)
       {
           _HeaderToSearch = headerToSearch;
       }  

       public bool Predicate(SprintBacklogItem item)
       {
           return item.Title.StartsWith(_HeaderToSearch, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);
       }  

   }  

2. Next , I initialized the ListMatcher object and use the HeaderToSearch  to filter the items- 

ListMatcher matcher = new ListMatcher("QA");
this.FindAll(matcher.Predicate);

Done.:)