Yesterday I assisted to the 3 E3 main press conferences by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

Lately I haven’t been such an active video game player as I used to be some months ago, but now I’m feeling that during this year and the next one I’ll come to my roots

Microsoft XBox 360

From Microsoft, as a XBox 360 owner I was glad to hear that XBox Live will have integration with Facebook and Twitter, my two main social networks. For gold membership owners will get full access to Last.FM through their XBox 360 systems.

But the best of all, that really got me crazy was Project Natal. My friend Marco wrote a post on his blog about it and it has 2 MUST SEE videos.

Nintendo

The news about Nintendo DS weren’t that appealing to me, since I don’t own a Nintendo DS, but it’s obvious that Nintendo is targeting young women with several games meant to them. The focus in user generated content is a great initiative. It doesn’t apply only to Nintendo DS applications but also video games with user generated levels.

As a Wii owner I really must buy Wii Sports Resort with Wii Motion Plus that is coming to stores in July.

As a fan of one of the best games I’ve ever played (if not the best) I was glad to ear that a Super Mario Galaxy sequel is coming. You can watch the trailer at GameTrailers.com

Nintendo also announced Wii Vitality Sensor which can read your vital signs and find out whether you’re anxious or focused, etc. I’m not really convinced, but I’ll wait and see.

Sony Entertainment

 I own a PSP 3000, and I won’t buy PSP Go, but a new handheld video game console it’s always good news for gamers. And I didn’t pay attention to Playstation 2 and 3 news…

You can what the 3 press conferences though Gamespot at http://e3.gamespot.com/press-conference/

As a Firefox user, one of the extensions that I can’t live without is Userstyles.  They allow me to remove tons of ads and format some webpages that I use in my daily life in the way I want.

A few months ago I started using IE8 as my main browser in my personal laptop. And very happy about it because it’s lighter than Firefox, and I don’t really need all the extensions outside work. But I missed Userstyles…

After searching for a while I found information about custom cascade style sheets in IE in a Microsoft article.

By following this step-by-step tutorial, you can set a custom css file for your browser. The changes are applied after browser restart, and it’s somewhat limited when compared with userstyles, since you can’t turn on/off setting on the fly and the css rules are global, which means that you change a class properties for a website, and you happen to navigate to another one that uses the same class, the css rules will also be applied.

Nevertheless, now I was able to remove ads from Windows Live Hotmail in IE8, remove the search bar that I don’t use and so on.

… because while reading my RSS feed subscriptions, there are a lot of news that are fake (clearly), and someones that I can’t tell if they are.

Edit: I just “hate”, not “have”.

A segunda edição do evento da comunidade PocketPT.net para os Profissionais de tecnologias móveis e relacionadas, dá continuidade ao sucesso obtido pela primeira edição.
Este ano, de modo a oferecer um conjunto de conteúdos mais alargado, as duas tracks foram divididas em dois dias, sendo o primeiro dia reservado a programadores e o segundo a profissionais de TI.
Consegue-se assim uma maior riqueza e abrangência de conteúdos e intervenientes.

Mais um evento sobre Windows Mobile promovido pela comunidade PocketPT.NET. A julgar pelos a que já assisti irá valer bem a pena. Inscrições abertas. Mais informações no site oficial.

I’ve been using a feature of ASP.NET called Output Cache. It allows you to have server-side cache for your ASP.NET webpages. You can define several profiles and cache expiration rules. You can read more about it in a simple and short article at MSDN or in the full documentation also at MSDN.

A feature that I wasn’t able to find was cleaning all the cached data. You can remove cache for a specific page using HttpResponse.RemoveOutputCacheItem(”pagename”) but to remove all pages (which can have several cached versions each) you have to use some kind of workaround. You can use a Cache dependency relying in a item stored in HttpContext.Cache items collection, but for my particular scenario it wasn’t the right solution. Why?

If you have several front-end servers serving your website, you have independent cache systems, so when forcing a cache cleaning, you will force it only for the front-end serving your request. To solve this issue I’ve created a cache system relying on a file dependency. This way, when I change that file, all the front-end servers will clean their cache. I’ve included a CacheManager class that has the usual Add method, that automatically add the file dependency to cached data ( usually using Response.Cache.Add) and not only output cache.

Download source code and have fun exploring it.

While refactoring some C# code I came across some lines that seemed a bit awkward. I was trying to sort a list or an array randomly. That code was written before Linq came into the .Net Framework, so now I was able to figure out a new approach.

Since Linq to Objects has some similarities with SQL, I got the idea of trying the same approach that I used several times in SQL, which was ordering a SELECT statement using ORDER BY RAND().

The result is shown bellow.

It uses the Extension Methods syntax of Linq to save some bytes on the source code