The data connection builder dialog is a database tool component that’s included in Visual Studio and helps you build a connection string to a database. Last week though the standalone source code was published at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Connection/, so that anyone can use it to build a data connections independently of Visual Studio. According to the license, you can integrate and redistribute the source code with your application. With the data connection dialog, you can perform following tasks: Build/Modify connection strings. Customize the data connection dialog. ...

You’ve probably seen or worked with a number of them, but here’s the complete and admittedly rich list of Shared Source Licensing programs for developers offered by Microsoft. It sure is worth checking out.

In case you’ve didn’t notice Marin has posted a comment regarding my WPFSubsonic project and to be more precise a way I can read my application configuration file through my custom Visual Studio Tool. Now I just need to port it to my solution that supports the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and ObservableCollection class so that SubSonic Object can be bound to WPF controls. Thanks Martin

I don’t know how many of you are interested or follow up on this effort. For those of you that do, I’m happy to say that the first release is very close. The issue I still have to solve before publishing my code is the configuration one. Subsonic uses Web.Config to specify Database connection strings and the .Net 2.0 provider model to specify the Database drivers to be used. All these are configured in a custom configuration section that is read with a WebConfigurationSection descendant class at built time. Since though custom build providers are not available at the Windows Forms platform...

I had an accident last week, my Vista hard disk crashed . Fortunately I didn’t lose any valuable (it has happened to me before so I now know better and keep backups of everything important) data but my Vista Installation was gone. So after getting a new hard disk and completing the system rebuilt I decided to import my Outlook data (yes I had a backup ;-) I only lost a day’s mail). When the restore process completed all of my mail and RSS Feed folders were successfully imported. Now I only had

I don’t know how long it’s been since I wrote my last Data Access Layer or piece of SQL Code, it certainly has been too long to even remember. Since then I’ve used a number of ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) or/and DAL Code Generators to perform all the tedious data access manipulation  I needed. The ones I’ve used are LLBGen : Unfortunately this free version stop evolving a long time ago (since .Net framework 1.1) and became a commercial solution,Olero’s  ORM.Net : Which was my favorite Open Source (GPL Licensed) ORM, although it...

I've been playing around with WinFx... sorry .Net Framework 3.0 for quite some time now and faced a number of issues with those early releases with the most irritating one being the crashing of Visual Studio 2005 when, while debugging an application, an unhandled exception occurred. It's comforting to see though that most of the things that annoyed my in those early releases have already been resolved by the VS Team in .Net Framework 3.0 beta 2.

From Sotiris Filippidis' Weblog a great collection library (C5) everyone should check out...