SubSonic 3.0

I’ve used SubSonic 2.x for a while and I’ve blogged about how useful it was as a tool to aid my development projects. A few weeks ago, SubSonic 3.0 was released and I hadn’t spent much time reviewing the updates and changes to version 3.0 until this week.
At the present, I have several large projects [...]

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How to merge pages from a PDF document

A few months ago, I wrote a small article about extracting pages from a PDF document to create a new PDF document. This article will use the same library, iTextSharp, to merge pages from one PDF document to create a second PDF document.
For this utility, imagine having a PDF document with pages that are 8 [...]

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Using Microsoft WCF with Microsoft CRM 4

I experienced a problem with Microsoft CRM 4 that I hadn’t encountered in Microsoft CRM 3. When I upgraded my code from version 3 to version 4, I kept getting an error saying “Server was unable to process request.”
My first thought was that maybe I was doing something wrong. My code had worked fine [...]

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How to write an application supporting plug-ins

In one of my current projects, I’m designing web services that may interact with various different third-party software. Right now, I’m just integrating one third-party API into the web services. In the future, there may be a few different third-party APIs integrated into the system.
I didn’t want to include all of the third-party libraries as [...]

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How to serialize SubSonic objects with nullable properties

Recently, I ran into the following error when trying to serialize some SubSonic generated classes.
Cannot serialize member ‘XXX’ of type System.Nullable`1[XXX]. XmlAttribute/XmlText cannot be used to encode complex types.

The SubSonic autogenerated classes cannot serialize nullable types such as DateTime? and GUID?. This is really a .NET serialization problem and not directly related to SubSonic, since [...]

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SharpZipLib and Windows Extraction Wizard errors

On one of my sites, I encountered a problem when users where downloading and extracting the contents of ZIP archives created by SharpZipLib. These errors mainly occurred when users were using the Windows Compressed Folders Extraction Wizard (the Windows XP built-in ZIP archive software).
Some points of confusion is that I used 7-Zip and I was [...]

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Charting using .NET just got a lot easier

In the past, I’ve used various open source .NET charting libraries or Flash based libraries. I’ve even coded my own charting libraries for some complex data visualization requirements. Today, Scott Gu blogged about the the free Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET 3.5.

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How to extract pages from a PDF document

One of the great things about being a programmer is that when you need software that you don’t have, you can usually write a small utility application to do what you need without having to purchase the software.
If you own Adobe Acrobat ($299 USD) or FoxIt Editor ($99.00 USD), then you can just right click [...]

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Sorting items using ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit ReorderList control

A common issue that I find myself falling into is how to sort things such as categories. I could sort them alphabetically or by child record counts, but most often my system owners (who I’m developing my web applications for) want to be able to reorder the categories to match either the process flow or [...]

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How to use custom audit fields with SubSonic

SubSonic uses a few audit fields by default – you don’t need to write any code. However, the field names that are used are coded into the source code. You can modify the source code and generate a new assembly, but if you’re like me and would rather not edit the source code (so you [...]

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