Arnold Matusz's Blog

Lately I’ve come across an interesting situation involving BlogEngine.Net. I normally use Windows Live Writer to write my blog posts, and as I really love to post some programming related articles I use Syntax Highlighter. Sadly I don’t have Windows Live Writer set up (with all the plugins) on each workstation I work on, so whenever I need to change something in a post (typos, updates, etc.) and WLW is not at hand I get down and dirty and edit the XML files which the posts are saved in.

I hear you asking: Why you stupid idiot are you doing that when you can edit your posts in a nice WYGIWYS editor? Well, the only reason is that when I post code samples those need to be in pre tags where each and every space i very important. And after I edit/save a post in BE’s (online) the formatting is lost. » Continue reading ...

It is widely known that the in the software development process testing and debugging take much more time than actually writing the lines code. Some pessimistic articles talk about a ratio of up to 80% to 20% (debugging and test vs. code writing).

This is a very strong reason to get down and dirty to get to know the tools we are working with. Because in many cases the debugging activity is very long and without any fixed forecast of it's end exploring hidden features of the Visual Studio debugger can save you allot of time. » Continue reading ...

In my post about LINQ to XML - XPath I've mentioned how Microsoft warns about the performance bottleneck when using LINQ to XML with the Extension class from the System.Linq.XPath namespace.

"There is some performance penalty for using these methods. Using LINQ to XML queries yields better performance. So it is only advisable to use such LINQ to XML with XPath queries if and only if your application won't suffer from the slight loss of performance!"