Miguel Castro

Miguel Castro

CODE Author

Whether playing on the local Radio Shack’s TRS-80 or designing systems for clients around the globe, Miguel has been writing software since he was 12 years old. He insists on staying heavily involved and up-to-date on all aspects of software application design and development, and projects that diversity onto the type of training and consulting he provides to his customers and believes that it’s never just about understanding the technologies but how technologies work together. In fact, it’s on this concept that Miguel bases his Pluralsight courses. Miguel has been a Microsoft MVP since 2005 and when he’s not consulting or training, he speaks at conferences around the world, practices combining on-stage tech and comedy, and never misses a Formula 1 race. But best of all, he’s the proud father of a very tech-savvy 12 year old girl

Detailed Bio

Whether playing on the local Radio Shack’s TRS-80 or designing systems for clients around the globe, Miguel has been writing software since he was 12 years old. He insists on staying heavily involved and up-to-date on all aspects of software application design and development, and projects that diversity onto the type of training and consulting he provides to his customers and believes that it’s never just about understanding the technologies but how technologies work together. In fact, it’s on this concept that Miguel bases his Pluralsight courses. Miguel has been a Microsoft MVP since 2005 and when he’s not consulting or training, he speaks at conferences around the world, practices combining on-stage tech and comedy, and never misses a Formula 1 race. But best of all, he’s the proud father of a very tech-savvy 12 year old girl

Contact Information:

Articles Authored

  • ‘For-Each’ Of My Own

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - May/June

    November/December CoDe on the Road: The .NET Framework provides many new collection classes that you can iterate (for-each) through. But did you know that you can also iterate through values in any of your classes, not just those that use or inherit from collections?

  • Achieving Synchronicity: A Listbox Double-Feature

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - May/June

    Building complex Web controls with rich client-interfaces often requires the integration of some client-side JavaScript code with the control’s server-side code. While in some cases this does not have to become too complicated to achieve some pretty nifty results, it can often break the data synchronization between the control’s internal server code and the rendered client HTML code. This becomes a problem when the page posts back. In this article, I will build two very cool Web controls that are vulnerable to this problem and then show you how to fix it.

  • ASP.NET Development Through Web Controls and Declarative Programming

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - March/April

    ASP.NET WebControls do more than just allow you to write reusable components. They can provide an entire approach to Web application development, allowing you to bring a new level of OOP to the UI and letting you program declaratively.Lately I've come to notice that no other programming term has more definitions than declarative programming. In this article, I will attempt to explain it in terms of how it applies to .NET development, specifically ASP.NET through the use of WebControls. I'll do this by illustrating some real-world examples that I have used in my own projects. In the end, I hope to leave you with an understanding of what declarative programming is, how you can use it when developing ASP.NET Web applications, and how, with the help of WebControls, to use it as an approach to ASP.NET development.

  • Async-Up Your Objects

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - May/June

    Encapsulate asynchronous functionality directly into your business objects.The .NET Framework facilitates calling object methods asynchronously through the use of delegates. You may already know how to do this using helper code, but there is a cleaner and much cooler way of packaging this kind of functionality right inside your business objects.

  • Bloated Designs, Over-Architecting, and Refactoring

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - March/April

    Bloated Designs, Over-Architecting, and Refactoring

  • By the Skin of Your App

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - March/April

    Enable advanced skinning in your Web applications using an MVC pattern.MVC, or Model-View-Controller, is a design architecture that promotes separation among parts of an application, with particular focus on the presentation tier. The concept of MVC is inherent in the ASP.NET architecture and I'll show you how to take advantage of that in order to provide skinning or themes capability to your Web sites.

  • Custom Web Controls Demystified, Part 1

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - September/October

    When ASP.NET was released in 2002, it gave Web developers a whole new design paradigm to work with; one that varied greatly from the classic Active Server Pages that many Web developers worked with in the past. At the heart of this new way of developing Web applications are components known as Web controls. Though most Web developers use them while developing ASP.NET applications, many Web developers have not yet dived into the world of creating custom Web controls, even after all this time, and all .NET developers will soon face another release of .NET. In this article, I will attempt to give you a head-to-toe understanding of how Web controls work, and how to create them for yourself.

  • Custom Web Controls Demystified, Part 2

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - November/December

    In the first part of this article (CoDe Magazine, September/October 2005) you learned how to create an inherited Web control, as well as a fairly functional rendered Web control. In part two of this article you’ll learn three professional touches for your custom Web control. First, you’ll learn how to make all parts of your custom control resize correctly. Next, you’ll learn how to capture an event when the button is clicked or when text in the textbox changes. Finally, you’ll learn how to add basic styling.

  • Design for Extensibility

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - January/February

    Today’s clients seem to be getting more and more demanding regarding the flexibility of their applications and the speed in which modifications can be made. In this article, I will show you how to design applications with extensibility points so that they will grow with the clients’ needs as well as provide a way to “swap” functionality in and out as needed.

  • Develop Provider-based Features for Your Applications

    Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - March/April

    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.

  • Exploring the Bing API Using WCF

    Last updated: Saturday, January 18, 2020

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - May/June

    The TV commercials took me and many others by surprise. A stream-of-conscienceless-style ad that had our brains struggling to catch up with the next topic that the next person blurted out. Funny enough, the bouncing from topic to topic by the actors in the commercial seem to be a familiar metaphor to anyone that has traversed search results at one time or another. And at the end, a familiar logo appears: Microsoft, followed by a not-so-familiar one: Bing.

  • 'For-Each' Of My Own

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - September/October

    The .NET Framework provides many new collection classes that you can iterate (for-each) through.But did you know that you can also iterate through values in any of your classes, not just those that use or inherit from collections?

  • Integrating ASP.NET MVC and Angular JS

    Last updated: Tuesday, June 22, 2021

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - May/June

    Miguel looks at organizing styles and integrating technologies to make one spiffy new kind of app with multi-SPA layers, and you don’t have to throw away your Microsoft experience to do it.

  • Intro to Metro

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - July/August

    Ten years after the release of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is stirring the pot again with a new development platform that set’s to focus your talents on what everyone is betting is the next big thing, mobile devices; specifically in this case, tablets. The Windows Runtime, or WinRT, is the foundation for the development of applications designed to target Windows 8-driven touch-enabled devices, but what does that mean for .NET developers and their existing skill sets?

  • Protect Your Downloadable Files Using HTTP Handlers

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - March/April

    So you finally have a product to sell, and a site to sell it on. But wait; how do you prevent unauthorized users from downloading your products? Forms Authentication provides only part of the solution. In this article, I’ll show how to prevent specific users from accessing specific files on your site; even by browsing directly to them.

  • Tasks and Parallelism: The New Wave of Multithreading

    Last updated: Saturday, September 26, 2020

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - November/December

    Since the beginning of .NET, developers have been able to take advantage of multithreading when developing applications. In fact we’ve been given more than one programming model to accommodate just about any requirement that might come across. There’s the Thread class, the Thread Pool, the Async Pattern, and the Background Worker. Well, as if that isn’t enough, we now have a couple of more patterns that bring with them another genre - parallel programming.

  • Twitter Programming Using WCF and REST

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - September/October

    Along with an easy site with which you can access your account, there are many really cool Twitter clients out there. This is thanks to an exposed API that you can use to access all of Twitter’s features. The great thing is that this API uses a technology that WCF has embraced completely; I’m talking about REST. Though you can certainly use straight network programming to access and update your Twitter account, why not use the technology that Microsoft has put all their eggs into as far as communications programming is concerned? Twitter is, after all, all about communicating, right?

  • Understanding and Using Web Workers

    Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - January/February

    Miguel Castro teaches you the how to use Web Workers to do multi-threaded development in Web applications using JavaScript.

  • Understanding Dependency Injection and Those Pesky Containers

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - September/October

    We seem to be an industry enamored with buzz words. Even though XmlHttpRequest has been around since the mid-90s, mainstream programmers didn’t give it a second thought until someone attached the term AJAX to it. The same is true for the never-ending quest to put as many different words as we can in front of “driven-development.” Another term that hit the scene in recent years is dependency injection.

  • Understanding Microservices and Microservice Architecture

    Last updated: Thursday, May 6, 2021

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - January/February

    Microservices and Microservices Architecture are what Service Oriented Architecture aimed to be by focusing not only on service decomposition, but also associated characteristics that make your entire application resilient and robust. Miguel explains the what, why, and how of the latest architectural buzz word.

  • WCF the Manual Way… the Right Way

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - September/October

    Visual Studio 2008 as well as the .NET 3.0 extensions for Visual Studio 2005 add several new templates that allow you to quickly create .NET 3.0 items such as WPF forms, Workflows, and WCF services. We’ve used templates such as these since the beginning of time to create traditional application elements such as Windows Forms, Web Forms, and User Controls, so you would think that these are equally great; or would you? Unfortunately, creating WCF projects or project items come with more baggage than you can imagine. They also don’t exactly promote the best practices I feel should be considered when designing WCF services. So if you don’t use the built-in templates to create your services, what do you use? Well keep reading and I’ll show you how to create everything you need manually with ease while maintaining good design and coding practices.

  • Web Control Enhancements in ASP.NET 2.0

    Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - September/October

    I’m sure by now you’ve read more than your share of books and articles describing new ASP.NET 2.0 features. Master pages, themes, providers, etc., are all great, but have you read anything regarding custom Web control development and what has changed in 2.0? Well that’s what I’m here to tell you. If you’ve become involved in control development, either through my articles or on your own, I’ll describe some very cool enhancements that you can put to work right away in your controls using ASP.NET 2.0.

  • Web Control Templates Explained

    Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - July/August

    In my travels I’ve had a chance to spread the good word of Web control development to many around the country; and I’ve also had a chance to meet many programmers who have been writing controls for a while.While it’s awesome to get a chance to talk code with people who enjoy the same areas of .NET that I do, I notice that there is plenty in the Web control arena that they are not familiar with. Control templates are probably the quintessential example of this. I urge you to read this article and learn about what is probably the most important feature of custom Web control development that contributes to writing extensible controls.