Have you ever see what you find when you go to Google, type in "french military victories" and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button? This is the result:
One of the best articles I've see in these days is written by Rick Strahl and talks about Building a better .NET Application Configuration Settings Class.
Configuration settings are an important part to any non-trivial application. They make it possible for users of the application to configure it both before the application is run for the first time and even while the Application is running. .NET provides a good rudimentary mechanism of storing and retrieving configuration settings in the application’s .config file with the ConfigurationSettings class, but this mechanism is missing a number of essential features. In this article Rick describes how we can improve on the base functionality that .NET provides by providing a class that makes it easy to add new keys, provides strong typing, allows for encrypting of keys and the ability to make changes to the settings at runtime and write them back out into the configuration file.
A must to read!
A really useful tool for Visio is ready to download... UML stencil and template. Features (from the site):
The stencil supports all symbols of UML 1.5, specified in the OMG document formal/03-03-01, as well as previous UML versions 1.4, 1.3 and 1.1. The stencil also contains several symbols of the newly adopted UML 2.0, particularly, the Socket and new Pseudostate symbols, and additional symbols not specified by the standard, but used by many UML users.
The solution contains the template and two stencils: the stencil with UML symbols and relationships, and the stencil with UML stereotypes.
The stencil UML-AllSymbols for Visio 2000 contains the following shapes:
The stencil UML-Stereotypes contains the following shapes. These shapes can be attached to every UML symbol and relationship, and can be also used to decorate shapes in other Visio solutions:
