Paint.NET is an absolutely fantastic extension of the handy Paint tool that comes with Windows. Rick Brewster and his team has now deployed the latest version, Paint.NET 3.0. Here are the changes in the 3.0 version,

• Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface
• Available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish
• Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient.
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen
• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
• Generally improved and cleaner user interface
• History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
• “Merge Down” layer command

Download Paint.NET 3.0 from here.

Scott Guthrie announces that, Visual Studio team shipped the final release of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 yesterday. It is available for immediate download in all 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese). 

This SP release is a pretty major service pack release and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers. Included with the service pack are the support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which is also made available as a separate download back in May). It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.

You can download and install it here.

Here is a nice utility function that helps you convert a System.Type to it’s corresponding System.Data.SqlDbType. Hope it’s useful.

private SqlDbType GetDBType(System.Type theType)
{
    SqlParameter param;
    System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter tc;
    param = new SqlParameter();
    tc = System.ComponentModel.TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(param.DbType);
    if (tc.CanConvertFrom(theType))
    {
        param.DbType = (DbType)tc.ConvertFrom(theType.Name);
    }
    else
    {
        // try to forcefully convert
        try
        {
            param.DbType = (DbType)tc.ConvertFrom(theType.Name);
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            // ignore the exception
        }
    }
    return param.SqlDbType;
}

Microsoft just officially released the .NET Framework 3.0 version.

You can download the .NET Framework 3.0 components here:

• .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components
• Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP

Note, if you are using Windows Vista the .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components are installed by default. For all other operating systems you have to install it manually by clicking on the appropriate links above.

The Readme for the released version of the .NET Framework 3.0 is available here.  If you have a previous .NET Framework 3.0 CTP installed, please be sure to review the uninstall instructions.   If you have questions about installing the .NET Framework 3.0, please post your questions to the .NET Framework Setup Forum.

(If you don’t see any of the images below please refresh the page a few times until you see the images. WordPress for some reason randomly cuts off some of the images at times. My apologies for the inconvenience.)

I know I’m blogging this a bit late but I just wanted to get this info out to my readers anyway. Microsoft ASP.NET Atlas team has released the renamed framework, which competes with AJAX, with the name “ASP.NET AJAX“. They call the initial release as “ASP.NET AJAX v1.0“.

AJAX is a great infrastructure and a great experience for the web based users without having to mess with page refreshes for small little things. It gives the user an enhanced and rich user experience allowing things to be done in the background without stealing the control of the page from the user. It provides the framework and controls to support/enable this great user experience.

At a glimpse, here is what the ASP.NET team says about AJAX,

Cross browser compatibility…that’s a great news from Microsoft. I love it when things work across the browsers without having to tweak things to make it work across. That’s a great news. I’ve tried this a bit and it looks very promising and cool to me. We even have thought about using this on one of our product functionalities. There are pretty lengthy keyword/attribute names to deal with but hey, as long as it works who cares.

For those of us to get started on this new framework, Scott Guthrie, the General Manager at the .NET Development Platform team, has put forward a videocast that explains pretty much of the basics for anyone to get started. (You might want to watch the video very closely as Scott is fluent enough to do things pretty fast).

There are a bunch of other ASP.NET AJAX resource videos at this location. It’s pretty cool to see Nikhil Kothari, the guy who is the cause of this whole thing from the beginning, has some videos for us to view. Great job Nikhil.

Okay…enough said. Go ahead and get the new framework, read some of the documents, watch few videos and get started.

(Alternate link if you don’t see the “Download Now” image above.)

You might want to download this as well as this toolkit has pretty rich and ready-to-run sample controls and a powerful SDK to simplify creating custom ASP.NET AJAX controllers and extenders.

(Alternate link if you don’t see the “ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit” image above.)

Of course, you should visit the official ASP.NET AJAX site to understand this whole thing. This site is the home site for ASP.NET AJAX and it has pretty extensive help/documents/videos to get started on this new framework.

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For those of us who deals with the reality of ASP.NET/Visual Studio.NET IDE day-in and day-out, here is a trick which I hope would be handy for you if not today, well at some point of time.

So, lets say you had a perfectly working ASP.NET Site/Web Service and that goes nicely with the Visual Studio.NET IDE. As in any normal development lifecycle we might wanted to tinger with the service/site by moving it to a different machine or location and things like that without forgetting the fact that at times we might even wanted to change some settings with IIS. Fine. So what?

Well, when you mess up with any settings or your site/service your VS.NET IDE doesn’t go nice with IIS anymore. Yes, it complains with the above dialog, with the message "Unable to get the project file from Web server. Unable to open Web project <projectname>. The file path <path> does not correspond to the URL <URL>. The two need to map to the save server location. HTTP Error 403: Access Forbidden." And most of the time it just suck up your development time to fix this issue and think about this happening at a crucial time. Well, it did happen to me last time when I badly wanted my IDE to work.

You and I know from the above message that it has something to do with the .webinfo file having a wrong mapping. Well, in both the instances when I faced this that wasn’t been the case. Then I made sure the IIS Virtual Directory points to the correct local path, recreated IIS application etc. and nothing seems to resolve. Then this simple fix made it to work and that is going to be my fix for this issue.

So, what I really did? Pretty simple. I just deleted my virtual directory in IIS and then recreated it again. Restarted IIS and bingo. My IDE was able to play nice with IIS again.

Hope it helps.

PS: If the above solution doesn’t work or is not a choice for you then try this one. Find the "VSWebCache\<ProjectName>" folder under your Documents and Settings folder and delete it and try it again.

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How do you guys set a data breakpoint in VS.NET IDE if you are running C#? This is what I got when I tried to set one.

Any alternatives?

Tags: C#, Data Breakpoints, Breakpoints