We've been making some great progress on DNN customizations, skins and implementations. I know there's a large community of DNN enthusiasts out there. Last weekend, I came across this web site, http://dnncreative.com.

Its a great resource for one of the items we enjoy, creativity and CSS on DNN. I signed up and paid my fee to get the member only content. There's a large collection of screen casts that explain the details of CSS in the DNN environment. They're currently on Issue #9. Each issue is chop full of great DNN information. The content is spot on for what we like to do. It's a real gem.

There's great content on here for people just getting started with DNN as well as advanced info for CSS specialists. A great job by some blokes across the pond.

Sometimes I really enjoy starting at the beginning, and this is one of those times. I settle down in my chair with a snack, and watch all the videos from the very beginning, no matter how basic. For one thing, it helps me keep fresh on how to explain DNN to other folks. Plus, le Wife will be out of town for a bit. That means I can plug my laptop into the big screen projection system in my basement, and watch to some great content in the confort of my home media center; uninterrupted.

Holy Cats!

I was browsing my logs on my blog and I discovered I'm the #1 search result for the phrase "ADO Excel Query" for the msn.com search engine.

My posting is really just calling out another person's post that I used to solve a problem. Nonetheless, that's pretty sweet.

I'm #1 baby!!! Number one!!!

I've been meaning to learn more about the VS.Net 2005 details, so after a nicely grilled steak and a glass of wine, I set myself down to read the MSDN library on the topic of Code Snippets.

Code Snippets are one of the great new features in VS.Net 2005. They provide a method for a programmer to quickly insert snippets of code by typing just a few keystrokes.

An examination of the code over the course of several projects will reveal a set of patterns: classes, properties, event handlers, constructors and methods. Just a few characters vary in these patterns.

The preceding lines of code provide an example of the pattern inherent in a property. The values "_name" and "Name" represent the private and public values accessible to the class. Code Snippets allow you to produce this code with a minimal amount of keystrokes.

To produce the property show above:

Move your cursor to an appropriate position the class
Press Control+K, Control+X to bring up the Code Snippets Intellisense Context Menu
Type "prop" and press the Tab key

This will result in the following code:

The cursor starts at the first green section, which defaults to the integer data type. Entering the new data type will overwrite the characters "int". After the actual datatype is entered, pressing the Tab key will advance the cursor to the next green section, which defaults to "myVar". Entering the actual value here will overwrite the characters on line 19, line 23 and line 24 simultaneously. This is where you should see the value of code snippets. While C# is slightly more cryptic than VB.Net, there is still a great deal of value to be gained by using a tool like Code Snippets.

There are similar snippets for classes, interfaces and many other patterns. There are over 50 snippets by default. Custom snippets can also be created.

Anywhere a pattern exists in code, a solid case can be made for using Code Snippets. Imagine a class that has over 20 properties. The economy of scale becomes obvious.

Code Snippets are great, but its just the start. 3rd party vendors like Developer Express have built great tools like CodeRush, which represent the next level up in productivity. If you have a great deal of code that could be automatically generated, tools like CodeSmith represent the 3rd level. If you stand to gain a huge advantage from code generation, you can author your own code generator using Microsoft.Net classes. That's right; code that writes code. I just blew your mind.