DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Setsuko

Visual Studio Debugging Feature - Tracepoints

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:31:04 GMT

A tracepoint is simply a breakpoint that will emit a debug trace statement when it is reached. It can emit things like the current function name, stack trace, or the contents of a variable. What's really cool is that you don't have to actually stop execution. This allows you to quickly add debugging statements without the need to check out your code or remember to take the Debug.WriteLine statements out afterwards.

Next-Generation Rich Client with Vidyano

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:16:14 GMT

The Vidyano team just made the release candidate version of their next-generation in rich client software available. Applications build with Vidyano take advantage of technologies such as WPF, Workflow, LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, Add-Ins, etc. Vidyano drastically reduces the complexity of these technologies by adding wizards, designers and custom tool generators to the Visual Studio environment.

Developing Facebook applications in C# with ASP.NET

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:46:05 GMT

write a Facebook application using ASP.NET and C#.

Create amazing looking full-blown WPF applications within minutes

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:01:02 GMT

The Viydano team just released their public beta, you can download it from the website for free. It allows you to create full-blown data-driven WPF applications within minutes, without sacrificing or limiting development freedom. This is their second release and going by the new features list, it looks like it came a long way since the last public CTP.

Dear Asp.Net Developers: Stop Making Our Technology Look Bad

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:01:11 GMT

Have you ever tried to use one browser and one browser only? This article outlines how impossible it can be even in 2008 to do. There are countless public facing Asp.Net web sites that require Internet Explorer. The perception and impact this has on the non Asp.Net community is something developers need to think about. It is an interesting read that provides a lot of insight into the problem and some ways to fix it.

36 steps to success as technical lead

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:16:20 GMT

The "tech lead" role can be treacherous at times. While the name implies "leadership", most of the times it doesn't come with implied authority like a manager role for example. It often happens that this role is in a no-man's-land where it brings a lot of responsibility but not enough formal authority. In order to successfully help a project from this position one has to navigate through narrow and convoluted straits.

LINQ to SQL - Am I Hitting The Database?

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:16:09 GMT

Like most other developers who have been using LINQ for a while (and in this particular case, LINQ to SQL) - I've unknowingly made a few 'bad queries' that performed great at first, but eventually made some pages crawl. This post isn't necessarily about performance, but if you don't know how to answer that question ("am I hitting the database"), then you'll likely find yourself in a world of problems down the road when you're using LINQ to SQL.

IntelliSense for Expression Blend

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:16:05 GMT

An add-in for Expression Blend 2.5 that adds IntelliSense for editing of XAML files.

13 reasons for UML's descent into darkness

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:01:03 GMT

UML lost the programmers. There is no doubt about it. in my mind. And when a software design technology loses the programmers it fades away no matter what the academia thinks. This happened because UML was pushed in a direction that most code writers don't like: it started to look a lot like bureaucratic paper work.

Effects and Transitions for Silverlight

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:01:09 GMT

Pre-packaged, declarative effects and transitions for Silverlight apps

My Favorite .NET Link Blogs

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:01:09 GMT

Link blogs are one of the common types of blogs that are actually a list of links to other resources in a specific field. At first glance, it seems easy to collect some links and present them in a blog post and somehow this statement is right but there are some people who don't take it easy and put a good effort to present great link blogs.

Real-Time Multilingual WPF Demo

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:16:11 GMT

Extend your WPF user interface with multilingual features. By adding a few markup extension to your xaml, your UI is translated in no less than 25 languages using the Google AJAX Translate API.

Creating full-blown WPF applications within minutes using Vidyano

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:31:03 GMT

Vidyano is a new product that allows you to literally create WPF applications, optionally running on top of Windows Workflow, within minutes. The July 2008 CTP, as well as a quickstart tutorial, just became available as public downloads. The screencast is a quick overview on some of Vidyano's initial features, it also shows you how to apply a workflow state machine as an engine behind a pagecontroller. More info and tutorials will become available in the upcoming days/weeks.

Wizards to the limit?

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:01:30 GMT

While looking for a visual studio addin, I came across this post announcing a program called vidyano. the speaker is building WPF-WF-Linq to SQL aplications with almost no code. Looking forward to see if this product wil, for ones, not limit our development freedom!

55 Free High Quality Icon Sets

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:01:02 GMT

A lot of freebie icons. Another great article from Smashing Magazine

Why use the Entity Framework?

Mon, 19 May 2008 06:27:51 GMT

There are a number of places where you can read an introduction to the Entity Framework, listen to a podcast about it, or watch a screen cast or video of an interview. Even with these various resources, though, there are so many different data access technologies out there that it's not uncommon for me to get the question: Why should I use the Entity Framework? Or what differentiates it from other options like just using ADO.Net SqlClient and friends, LINQ to SQL or something like nHibernate? I like the second question better, because the truth is that different problems merit different solutions.

Expression Tree Basics

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:01:09 GMT

Newcomers to LINQ often find expression trees difficult to grasp. In this post I hope to show that the subject is not quite as difficult as it might appear at first. Any reader who has an intermediate level understanding of LINQ should find the material in this post easy to grasp. An expression tree provides a method of translating executable code into data. This can be very valuable if you want to modify or transform code before executing it. In particular, it can be useful if you want to transform C# code such as a LINQ query expression into code that operates on another process, such as a SQL database. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By the end of this post you will find it easy to understand why it is helpful to translate code into data. First I need to provide a little background. Let's start by seeing the relatively simple syntax for creating an expression tree.

Firing events with Extension Methods

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:31:06 GMT

A different way of firing standard .Net events using Extension Methods

WPF Presentation using WPF

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:16:02 GMT

Full source code to a presentation on WPF using WPF showing off some of the basic concepts, how to get started and where it will lead you. Why would anyone use powerpoint to give a presentation on WPF?

Parallel Extensions to the .NET FX CTP

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:16:03 GMT

Today we released an early preview of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework (ParallelFX) technology, available for download on MSDN. This release contains new APIs to make programming on the .NET Framework simpler as well as supporting documentation and samples.