One of my favorite features in Visual Studio is Snippets. I find them very useful when trying to code something really really fast. Till now I had to write them all by hand and then import them on VS, well not any more.

Matthew has released a first version of the Snippet Designer. In it you’ll find:

• A Snippet Editor hosted in the IDE which lets you edit the code, make replacements and change snippet properties
• A Snippet Explorer which lets you search for Snippet files on your computer an quickly open and edit them.
• A context menu item inside of the VB, C# and XML editor that lets you export any highlighted code into the snippet editor

You can find more information about it in Mathew’s blog http://blogs.msdn.com/matt/archive/2008/09/21/the-snippet-designer-is-released.aspx

I'm pretty often asked the question "Can I use real (as in coming from a database) data in my Silverlight application?" the answer is “of course”, although this requires a lit more work than any other technology (WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF) you could use. The reason for that is, that as you probably already know, Silverlight runs on the client, so you’ll need a way to move the data from the server to the Silverlight Client application. There are a number of ways you can achieve that... read more

One of the great advantages offered by Entity Framework compared to Linq to SQL is the fact that it is designed to support any database not just MS SQL. All you need to have in order to connect to third party databases is the right ADO.NET provider.

Unfortunately till recently there were no implementations of such providers. Devart (formerly Core Lab) though, has released a new version of their ADO.NET providers, which includes support for the Entity Framework.

So with DevArt's new ADO.NET providers you'll be able to connect to Oracle, MySQL, and Postgress using Entity Framework.

I have needed to implement URL rewriting in a lot of projects I was involved with in the past and have chosen various solutions for each, from building my own solution till using open source modules such us UrlRewriting.Net.

If your web project is going to be hosted on IIS 7 though, then I would highly recommend using the IIS URL Rewrite Module.

The Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 provides flexible rules-based rewrite engine that can be used to perform broad spectrum of URL manipulation tasks, including, but not limited to:

• Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URL with dynamic web applications;
• Rewriting URL’s based on HTTP headers and server variables;
• Web site content handling;
• Controlling access to web site content.

My hosting provider is located at Germany which has always made it kind of difficult to communicate. I selected a long time ago cause it was cheap and now I don't want get into the whole process of moving everything somewhere else. So whenever I have to ask them something I always use a translation service to understand what they're saying (yes I don't know German and yes they always reply in German :-))

Today though I've read that the Windows live messenger translation bot was released. For those of you that haven't worked with live bots before, these are programs that using an algorithm can answer your questions using your IM software. So next time there will be no need to open up my browser and use altavista's babelfish or something like that to understand what my German hosters are trying to say ;-)

Cool!

Just a few days after Microsoft released IE8 Goggle retaliated by releasing their browser, Chrome. After installing it my first impressions are:

• Extremely clean and streamlined UI
• Nice source view and developer helpers
• Nice download manager
• Extremely fast page loading
• Great JavaScript performance

What's missing (in my opinion):

• Grouped tab browsing
• Web Slices
• Accelerators

To conclude, I thing IE8 is a more feature complete browser according to my standards and although it's beta has more rendering problems than chrome has at the moment, I'm sticking to IE as my default browser.

UPDATE: It doesn't support Silverlight arghhh!!!