Peter Shaw

Many of the posts I write for this column come directly from common things I see being asked in the community. That community might be Lidnug, it might be Stack Overflow, Code Project, or many of the small, obscure forum and help sites. The point here is, there are questions that I see over and […]

How do you run processes under Windows? To many, this might seem like a bit of a strange question, because you’re used to starting Explorer, finding the application or process you want to run, and then clicking it to start it. You might also be used to using the command line and typing in the […]

You would be surprised just how often this question crops up in most of the usual places .NET developers ask questions. It arises from the use of ‘string’ in the C# language and the fact that Intellitype causes confusion by suggesting ‘String’ when using string-related functionality in a C# application. What many people don’t realise […]

We all work on ever increasing complexity these days. As software development evolves, so does the amount of information we have to deal with. This, in turn, leads to ever more complex application structures that we have to deal with, and objects that contain way more than just simple data types. Take, for example, the […]

I see a lot of questions on places like stack overflow, code project, and Lidnug. A lot of these questions are simple questions for simple routines, the type of routine that would easily fall into the class of “Utility Library Routine.” Time and Time again, question after question, the same ones pop up over and […]

In this day and age of JSON data everywhere, a lot of developers are leaving XML behind. There are, however, still some areas where XML is still used quite heavily; web and application configuration files are a start. There are also many financial institutions that still do pretty much everything internal to a core banking […]

If there’s one thing that’s been added to .NET in recent years that’s made working with data an absolute delight, it’s LINQ. LINQ to XML, LINQ to Objects, and all the various LINQ to “Thing” that an army of developers all over the planet have written, and you just simply can’t avoid it. One thing […]

These days, all you ever seem to see in the news are stories about websites getting hacked, and how many developers don’t do enough to protect the applications they write from the bad guys. Although that may be true in some places, there’s certainly no shortage of functionality built into the .NET framework to help […]

Recently, I had a requirement to monitor a Linux-based server from a Windows-based computer that was being used as a management station. Normally with something like this, you’d often employ some software that interrogates systems using the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) over a UDP connection. In the case of my requirements, however, this wasn’t […]

Pop quiz time. How many of you employ methods such as IoC in your projects, or for the non-devs, how many of you use an application that has some kind of ‘Plug-ins’ that it can use? I’m willing to bet that the positive result of that question is quite high, and as for the plug-in […]

In the not-too-distant past, even the thought of making an application speak to the user was nothing more than a far-off dream. With today’s hardware and the power it gives, having applications speak to you by using the sound system present in all modern day PCs is now as easy as eating. Using Text to […]

One of the best secrets the web keeps hidden is YQL, for those of you who’ve never heard of this little hidden gem, YQL stands for “Yahoo Query Language” and it’s an SQL-like syntax that allows you access to the masses of information available in Yahoo’s many different data stores. In this post, we’re going […]