DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Danielg

Fluent ADO.NET (there's actually a good reason for it!)

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:46:02 GMT

More DAL silliness, but for a good reason. The author was restricted from using an ORM by his client so he came up with a cool way to make his life a little easier. Pretty cool. Scratch that itch!

Optimizing Performance in WPF Applications

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:01:02 GMT

Ever fed up with your own WPF window taking too much time to load and render the contents? Had the bitterest of bitter experience that your WPF application eating up a lot of resources and memory and fighting harder to get through with the existing hardware configuration?

Content Stealing Jerks

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:01:02 GMT

I've grown somewhat accustomed to seeing my articles regurgitated on some random blogger's site and passed off as their own. Usually I just send content stealing jerk (CSJ for future reference) an e-mail asking that they provide some sort of link back to my original article and leave it at that. Sometimes they comply, oftentimes they don't. In the end, life goes on. After all, it's not like I'm going to press charges over it.

View Models: POCOs versus DependencyObjects

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:40:19 GMT

If you're leveraging the MVVM pattern in your WPF/Silverlight development, you will quickly be faced with a decision regarding the implementation of your view models: should they be DependencyObjects, or POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects)?

Building a Progressive Fluent Interface

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:31:32 GMT

Taking a look at how to build a Progressive Fluent Interface which is a DSL where the options can and will change as you progress through the syntax. This is a useful form of a fluent interface if the want to be able to skillfully guide the user down only one path at a time.

Do You Really Need a College Degree to Get a Programming Job?

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:16:04 GMT

There's plenty of articles about the shortage of skilled IT workers and the difficulty experienced by companies in finding qualified software developers. The whining would be far more credible if the Want Ads didn't have a silly, arbitrary qualification: a college degree.

Validation of NHibernate Entities

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:05:26 GMT

Article shows why NHibernate Validator is useful and how to configure it together with Fluent NHibernate in one project.

Things we wish Microsoft would fix in Visual Studio 2010

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:30:24 GMT

Now I know we are probably only one of ten companies in the world who actually need to write data plugins for Visual Studio. But there are a few things that are so broken they tend to really drive me nuts. I had a chance to speak with other DDEX developers at TechEd last year and asked them about these things. Almost universally they said "Yep, it's broke". And when I asked how they dealt with these issues, they almost all said that they ended up having to write custom wizards, dialogs, etc for Visual Studio because the built in ones are broke or don't know how to use Data Providers correctly.

You can do some crazy things with WCF

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:48:26 GMT

Have you ever wanted to code something that wasn't exactly best practices, but would make for a neat concept? I know that I have. That's why I decide to spike a database driver for NHibernate that works accross the network, or across WCF specifically.

AnkhSVN 2.0.6310 Released - Subversion Plugin for Visual Studio.

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:31:20 GMT

New features include: Experimental support of Visual Studio 2010, Overall performance improvemens, and much more...

UX patterns vs UI patterns

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:50:36 GMT

Distinction between UX and UI

Sending Domain Objects Across the Wire

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 23:31:03 GMT

or Using NHibernate and WCF

Static typed propety names

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:46:04 GMT

This blog post describes how to avoid using literals with property names (like "FirstName") and protecting from mistyping those names in your code. Examples based on Nhibernate queries, notifying on property changes and displaying error messages...

Why aren't I an MVP?

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:16:03 GMT

There's a problem with the MVP program I'd like to talk about. The fact that I'm no longer an MVP (haven't been for over a year now) isn't the problem, merely a symptom. My problem is that I don't know why I'm not an MVP, and by extension I don't know why others are. The process of becoming and remaining an MVP is completely opaque. Plainly, the MVP program lacks transparency.

House of Cards Design Anti-Pattern

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:54:00 GMT

Peter details what he calls the "House of Cards" design anti-pattern.

Things to Notice When Binding to Large Collection

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:46:02 GMT

Lately I was working on an application that had to display a large amount of objects on screen and allow filtering. I have learned that scrolling large collections was not so simple in WPF, and I definitely did not see the problems coming.

Beyond SoundEx - Fuzzy Searching in MS SQL Server

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:01:20 GMT

In this post see how you can perform fuzzy deduping operations and fuzzy string matching by bringing the power of an open source string metric library (SimMetrics) into sql server

ASP.NET MVC - Think Before You Bind

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:31:20 GMT

ASP.NET MVC is a powerful and simple framework, but there are a few things that ASP.NET developers will need to pay careful attention to when moving to MVC. This post discusses the automatic binding abilities in ASP.NET MVC and why you need to think before you bind.

The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:46:12 GMT

Discussion of NNPPs and how to tackle them.

Understand Unit Testing and TDD: Getting Better Code Coverage

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:56:44 GMT

How do you approach testing your code? The author goes through how to think about testing- what to look for, what to analyze, and how to structure your unit tests.

Oxite - Oh Dear Lord Why?!

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:01:16 GMT

Oxite is an open source application built on ASP.NET MVC and Karl Seguin raises some points related to the design/architecture/implementation.

StructureMap and the Singleton Scenario

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:27:23 GMT

StructureMap is a great DI tool but in using it I have discovered an interesting shortfall. It would appear that even transient or "Per-Request" objects are only ever created once per declarative request thus having the effect of making everything singleton-ish.

CLR 4.0: Corrupted State Exceptions

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 08:05:18 GMT

CLR 4.0 will not allow you anymore to catch exceptions that may corrupt the state of the current running process, the CLR 4.0 introduced this new concept of Corrupted State Exceptions (i like to think of those as Super Exceptions), those exceptions that could corrupt the state of the process and causing losing user data or weird application behaviors

CLR 4.0: New Enhancements in the Garbage Collection

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 08:03:59 GMT

The current Garbage Collection does pretty good job in reclaiming the memory of Gen 0 and Gen 1, those Generation's objects live in ephemeral segments which is very small and GC reclaims their memory very fast, on the contrary most of Gen 2 objects live in other large segments which make Gen 2 large objects collection slower than other collections. The GC team actually made great improvements in collection algorithms on both the server and the workstation to make it faster and reduce latency.

C# Delegate Shortcut - No more null testing on events for subscribers

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:04:25 GMT

Do you use this syntax? It adds up as you can leave null tests in the dust for event subscribers: EXAMPLE: public event EventHandler<AnimationImageEventArgs> AnimationImageClicked = delegate { }; Post has full details, but most might already know this. If not your wasting cycles.