CoDe Magazine News

Publisher's Point: Visual Studio Platform and Extensibility

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: Visual Studio Platform and Extensibility

As a .NET architect and developer I cannot imagine my everyday work without Visual Studio. I was always in a strange excitement when waiting for a new CTP, Beta or RTM of Visual Studio because I always expected some great new features with every release. During the years I have bought a few third-party add-ins and utilities for Visual Studio to make my development tasks easier and even created small add-ins to produce some useful piece of code. I knew that Visual Studio was extensible; I downloaded the SDKs and tried to get familiar with those hundreds of extensibility interfaces. However, due to lack of good documentation I often got frustrated.

Publisher's Point: What's The Resolution?

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: What's The Resolution?

Markus Egger discusses screen resolutions.

Publisher's Point: How Many Threads Do You Need?

Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: How Many Threads Do You Need?

Markus Egger discusses the need to create multi-threaded applications.

Publisher's Point: Beyond the Mists of Avalon

Mon, 6 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: Beyond the Mists of Avalon

Markus Egger discusses tools used to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly "Avalon") interfaces, in particular, WinFX Extensions for Visual Studio as well as the Microsoft Expression product line.

Publisher's Point: LINQ Up!

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: LINQ Up!

At PDC 2005, Microsoft announced a new technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which will be available with Visual Studio “Orcas” (the next version of Visual Studio). A lot of exciting new technologies are announced at every PDC, and as a result, LINQ got some attention, but not nearly as much as I think it deserves. LINQ represents the ability to run queries right inside of Visual Basic, C#, or any other .NET language.

Publisher's Point: C-Sharpest

Sun, 4 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: C-Sharpest

C# 2.0 just shipped with a number of interesting new features: anonymous methods, nullable objects, iterators, partial classes, generics, and others. But the innovation does not stop there! Microsoft (and Anders Hejlsberg in particular) have already allowed us a sneak peek at some of the new features that will be available in C# 3.0.

Publisher's Point: The Quest for the Killer App

Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: The Quest for the Killer App

Markus Egger discusses the evaluation of new technologies.

Publisher's Point: User Interface Challenges

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: User Interface Challenges

Markus Egger discusses user interface technologies developers should familiarize themselves with.

Publisher's Point: Where's Your Logic?

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: Where's Your Logic?

Markus Egger discusses the role of business logic in modern application architecture.

Publisher's Point: Who's On First?

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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Publisher's Point E-Column: Who's On First?

Markus Egger discusses the importance of a solid basis of knowledge.

CoDe Magazine: 2009 Jul/Aug

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

CoDe Magazine, Issue 2009 Jul/Aug is now available!

CoDe Magazine – the Leading Independent Magazine for .NET Developers

Online Article: Design for Change in UpdatePanel-based ASP.NET AJAX Applications

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Design for Change in UpdatePanel-based ASP.NET AJAX Applications

Change is always a central issue for software development.In this regard Microsoft AJAX Web application is never an exception. You may find your application packed with a plethora of UpdatePanels and event handlers. Besides, you may be confused that ASP.NET AJAX offers more than one technique to do one thing but you cannot use them consistently. As a result, it becomes hard to make changes in your application.

Online Article: The State of WPF & Silverlight

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: The State of WPF & Silverlight

Markus Egger discusses the current State of WPF and Silverlight and the overall importance and acceptance of these technologies.

Online Article: Post Mortem: WPF and Silverlight Styling

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Post Mortem: WPF and Silverlight Styling

Online Article: 10,000 Hours to Graceland

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: 10,000 Hours to Graceland

Rod Paddock July/August 2009 Editorial

Online Article: Add a Safety Net to Your Software with Tower 48

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Add a Safety Net to Your Software with Tower 48

Markus Egger/Tower 48 Advertorial

Online Article: Time to Clean Up!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Time to Clean Up!

Why is it that over time, any machine you buy just seems to get slower and slower?Why is it that over time, any machine you buy just seems to get slower and slower?

Online Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging

One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production.All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another problem of being an on-demand consultant is that the clock starts ticking even before I've understood the problem description.One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production. All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another

Online Article: Build Composite WPF and Silverlight Applications

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Build Composite WPF and Silverlight Applications

WPF is finally gaining momentum, and so is Silverlight.Users are starting to take a serious look at Silverlight as an option for rich applications; some of them even have scenarios where targeting both platforms make sense. The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight Applications has received improvements that help developers building either WPF, Silverlight, or both types of composite applications.

Online Article: Implementing OpenID Authentication in an ASP.NET Application

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Implementing OpenID Authentication in an ASP.NET Application

Today, more and more websites need to identify who their users are. However, in most cases this involves providing authentication, which requires storing the users handle and password. An alternative to this is to allow a third party to authenticate the user and provide your website with the identity. This absolves you from needless worries of securing the authentication information. An emerging standard for identification is OpenID (http://www.openid.net). OpenID is a shared identity service, allowing users to log into many Internet sites using a single digital identity. This article will explore how to extend the ASP.NET provider model to accept a user’s OpenID.

Online Article: 8 Entity Framework Gotchas

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: 8 Entity Framework Gotchas

As a developer, it is no surprise to encounter unexpected behavior when working with a new technology.Microsoft added the Entity Framework (EF) to ADO.NET with the .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 released in 2008 enabling developers to incorporate a data model directly in their application and interact with their data through the model rather than working directly against the database. For background on EF, see my previous article, “Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework” in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of CODE Magazine.

Online Article: INotifyPropertyChanged Is Obsolete

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: INotifyPropertyChanged Is Obsolete

The INotifyPropertyChanged interface, while easy to implement, is hard to consume.Registering for notification events requires extra bookkeeping code that obfuscates business logic. Update Controls is an open source library that replaces event-based data binding with automatic discovery and updating. Powerful yet difficult patterns become simple.

Online Article: Dressing Up Your Data with WPF DataTemplates

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Dressing Up Your Data with WPF DataTemplates

It’s becoming less and less common to show raw data directly to the user.At the very least, portions of your data may require reformatting to make it more readable for your users. But applying a simple format, say showing a numeric value as a percentage, only goes so far. WPF offers an impressive data transformation tool called Data Templates that can radically change the visualization applied to business data.

Online Article: Relational Database Persistence with NHibernate, Part 2

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Relational Database Persistence with NHibernate, Part 2

This article continues from the May/June 2009 issue of CODE Magazine (Quick ID 0906081) which covered why you want to use NHibernate, techniques for configuring NHibernate, how to map your objects to your data entities, and how to load basic objects.

Online Article: RIA Services: RAD for the Middle Tier

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: RIA Services: RAD for the Middle Tier

RIA Services is a new Microsoft framework for developing n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications. RIA Services make it easier to build Silverlight applications that communicate with a server, which is the focus of this article. As a developer, RIA Services provides automatic code generation for common scenarios where you need to perform CRUD operations on data and have a consistent model to validate data across tiers. The following sections explain how to get started with RIA Services, specify a data source and a UI, and automatically generate code for CRUD operations. Let me show you the big picture of RIA Services from an architectural perspective first.

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

July/August 09 Doc Detective Column

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Of Killer Waves and Sea Changes

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Of Killer Waves and Sea Changes

Writing software is hard, particularly when the tools you use force you to think at too low a level; it’s time to start thinking about changing the way you write code… by thinking about the industry around us and how that affects your environment.Every so often an event comes along in the industry that represents a potential “sea change” to how the industry operates. Sometimes these are technical changes, either by releasing a new technology or an important ground-breaking change to an existing one. Sometimes they’re economic, driven by market forces outside of our direct control. And sometimes, they’re financial, such as when two industry giants come together.

CoDe Magazine: 2009 May/Jun

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

CoDe Magazine, Issue 2009 May/Jun is now available!

CoDe Magazine – the Leading Independent Magazine for .NET Developers

Online Article: Hudson Continuous Integration Server

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Hudson Continuous Integration Server

Hudson makes continuous integration easy and powerful.Though Hudson is a Java project, it can easily build your .NET applications. You configure Hudson easily via the web interface rather than tweaking XML. With plenty of plugins available to .NET projects, Hudson provides plenty of powerful features.

Online Article: Relational Database Persistence with NHibernate, Part 1

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Relational Database Persistence with NHibernate, Part 1

Take advantage of the best relational databases and object-oriented design have to offer without compromising either.Using an object/relational mapping framework like NHibernate, you can significantly reduce the amount of code you write (and therefore potential bugs) for performing standard operations against your database and save the heavy ADO.NET coding for the complicated scenarios.

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Functional Programming in C# 2.0

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Functional Programming in C# 2.0

Writing software is hard, particularly when the tools you use force you to think at too low a level; it’s time to start thinking about changing the way you write code… by making it easier to write code.Taking on new ways to program doesn’t always mean tossing away your favorite programming language or environment. Sometimes it just means taking a new look at how you’re using your language and trying out a few new ideas. It’s time to take a hard look at your favorite language and see if it’s possible to “fall in love all over again”.

Online Article: Open Source Software

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Open Source Software

Rod Paddock's May/June 2009 Editorial article.

Online Article: Keep Software Simple

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Keep Software Simple

A lot of programmers tend to over engineer their software solutions.In the course of my consulting, I have reviewed many applications from many companies. In many cases I find a lot of areas where the software was just too complex. The reasons for this are varied, but seem to be centered around a few main areas: inappropriate use of design patterns, the “not invented here” syndrome, and building a Cadillac when a Chevy would do the job. You can solve these issues in many ways. All it takes is a little bit of re-thinking on how you build software. This article offers guidance on some things you can do to simplify your software development process

Online Article: Using jQuery with ASP.NET Part 2: Making an AJAX Callback to ASP.NET

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Using jQuery with ASP.NET Part 2: Making an AJAX Callback to ASP.NET

This time around I’ll expand on these concepts and show you how you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET as an AJAX backend to retrieve data. I’ll also discuss how you can create ASP.NET controls and otherwise interact with jQuery content from ASP.NET pages in Web Forms.

Online Article: Meet the Monkey: A .NET Programmer’s Introduction to Mono

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Meet the Monkey: A .NET Programmer’s Introduction to Mono

Are you curious about cross-platform .NET applications?Do you have a need or an interest in how to write .NET applications that will run on OS X? Do you need to deploy your application to a *nix box? If you’ve answered “Yes” to one of these last two questions or are curious about running .NET code on *nix, then read on.

Online Article: Bricks and Mortar: Building a Castle

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Bricks and Mortar: Building a Castle

In an application built with object-oriented techniques, objects are the bricks.You construct little pieces of code encapsulated in these bricks. To build bigger structures, you need to hold these bricks together. You can hardwire them together by instantiating dependent objects within your objects, but it makes the whole structure less flexible in the face of change. So you can adopt an inversion of control (IoC) container to act as your mason to assemble your bricks into complex structures that can flex with changing requirements. In this article, I will examine a popular IoC container, Castle Windsor, and how it enables you to build flexible and robust applications. If you are new to IoC containers and dependency injection, I would recommend reading Martin Fowler's article, Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern (http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html) and my own article from the March 2008 edition of MSDN Magazine, Loosen Up: Tame Your Dependencies for More Flexible Apps (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337885.aspx).

Online Article: Isolating Dependencies in Tests Using Mocks and Stubs

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Isolating Dependencies in Tests Using Mocks and Stubs

Unit tests are not “unit” tests if they test things other than the System Under Test (SUT).In order to test a SUT (the class to be tested), a developer must make sure that the class’s dependencies won’t interfere with its unit tests. Enter mocks and stubs.

CoDe Magazine: 2009 Mar/Apr

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

CoDe Magazine, Issue 2009 Mar/Apr is now available!

CoDe Magazine – the Leading Independent Magazine for .NET Developers. Get the Key to Web 2.0

Online Article: Develop Provider-based Features for Your Applications

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Develop Provider-based Features for Your Applications

The ASP.NET Provider Model drives many features within the ASP.NET architecture, yet most people only relate it to security or membership-related functionality. In this article, I’ll take you deep into the provider model, show you how it’s used from a security context, then take it up a notch and teach you how you can use it to turn any feature in your application into an extensible and swappable component. In fact, I’ll even show you why calling it the ‘ASP.NET’ Provider Model may be a misnomer.The ASP.NET Provider Model drives many features within the ASP.NET architecture, yet most people only relate it to security or membership-related functionality. In this article, I’ll take you deep into the provider model, show you how it’s used from a security context, then take it up a notch and teach you how you can use it to turn any feature in your application into an extensible and swappable component. In fact, I’ll even show you why calling it the ‘ASP.NET’ Provider Model may be a misnomer.

Online Article: Building Polished UIs with Expression Blend - Part 1

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Building Polished UIs with Expression Blend - Part 1

With WPF and Silverlight, Microsoft provides both Windows and Web developers with powerful technologies to create rich, professional, and exciting user experiences.However, in general, developers aren’t graphical designers, leaving most developers wondering how to cope with this new world of designed interfaces and polished user experiences. But fear not! With Expression Blend, Microsoft provides a great tool to create such UIs, and even developers with no graphical talents whatsoever can learn a few techniques that allow for better looking applications.

Online Article: Silverlight Enabled Live Search

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Silverlight Enabled Live Search

Tapping the full potential of RIA applications means involving remote Web services. In this article, I’ll present techniques that demonstrate how to communicate between Silverlight and Live Search using Silverlight’s services infrastructure.

Online Article: The Zen of Inversion of Control

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: The Zen of Inversion of Control

On the surface, this article is about the techniques of dependency injection and inversion of control.Underneath, the intent of the words and code samples is to get you to think about the questions of “why” and “when” you might want to use these two closely related techniques, as well a series of similar evolutionary techniques that lead up to the full-blown dependency injection. The initial code samples are admittedly (and deliberately) simple; I do not want the content of the code to obscure the intent of the code.

Online Article: Heard on .NET Rocks! Oslo Is Love with Chris Sells

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Heard on .NET Rocks! Oslo Is Love with Chris Sells

Mar/Apr 09 .NET Rocks Column

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Ask the Doc Detective

Mar/Apr 09 Doc Detective Column.

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Why The Next Five Years Will Be About Languages

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: ThoughtWorking: Why The Next Five Years Will Be About Languages

Writing software is hard, particularly when the tools you use force you to think at too low a level; it’s time to start thinking about changing the way you write code… by making it easier to write code.Back in the days of our fathers, programming meant focusing on learning one language, one platform, and one environment, and mastering it over a span of years. Those years are long behind us, along with half-decade project development times and bell-bottomed pants. It’s time to take a hard look at the “state of the union”, per se, and see how you can think about how to work better, rather than just putting in more time.

Online Article: Yes, We Can! 2009 Will Be Great!

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Yes, We Can! 2009 Will Be Great!

Mar/April 09 Editorial by Markus Egger

Online Article: Successful Software Development

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Successful Software Development

Software development is a lot more than just writing lines of code.You need to think about project management, prototyping, database design, software architecture, framework usage and a whole host of other factors. In this article you will learn one approach to developing software applications from start to finish.This approach has been used successfully to develop hundreds of applications by a software development company that has been around since 1991.

Online Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 with WCF and Silverlight

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 with WCF and Silverlight

Silverlight 2 just went RTM. This product is unique because for the first time in the Microsoft world, you have .NET running cross platform, in a secure way, without all the deployment hassles. It has the ability to bring rich UI, right within the browser-much like Flash, but with more capabilities and a .NET heart.So, what does this mean to you-the SharePoint developer? Well, as I elucidated in my previous article, developing rich UIs in SharePoint 2007 isn’t exactly my idea of a good time! In fact, it is a bit like a 3-year old playing drums on your head all night long while his 7-year old sister is sticking chewing gum in your hair as you are trying to sleep because you have an early morning 7 AM meeting tomorrow in a recessionary economy.Take heart! The thin .NET 3.5 development model makes it all easier.

Online Article: Dances with Workflows (One Newbie’s Journey)

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Dances with Workflows (One Newbie’s Journey)

Recently I started working with a client that was interested in using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in their application.Having never used WF before, I thought it might be interesting to document the experience and my assumptions as I started learning and implementing the technology in production.

Online Article: Building Domain Specific Languages in C#, Part 2

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Building Domain Specific Languages in C#, Part 2

In the first installment of this article, I showed how to leverage C# syntax to create a specific type of domain specific language in C# called a fluent interface, converting an API into something with a fighting chance of readability. In this article, I’ll show you how to take advantage of some of the cool new features of C# to really push the envelope on this style of coding.

Online Article: Programming Twittering with Visual Basic

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Online Article: Programming Twittering with Visual Basic

Social networking has reached critical mass. One unique social networking platform, Twitter, launched in March of 2006 and took the world by storm with its social networking and microblogging platform.The developers of Twitter had the forethought to provide a REST -based API. Numerous developers have used the REST-based API to build Twitter clients on dozens of different platforms. In this article I’ll demonstrate how to access Twitter using the .NET platform.