DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by jims

WPF: Reducing CPU consumption for animations « C# Disciples

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:46:02 GMT

Lately I've been working on a project at work and the application was performing pretty well. The CPU Usage was below 2% and I was quite happy with it. Then I decided to add a simple animation that continues executing forever. the results 15% CPU consumption . I was amazed at how much CPU was being wasted. Yet I am a stubborn guy and if I want an animation to execute forever, I will do it no matter what..

Compound Operators Or How T-SQL Is Morphing Into VB Or C#

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:01:02 GMT

C# is becoming more dynamic (like Python and Ruby) but now SQL is becoming more like C# (but with LINQ C# is becoming more like SQL) Confused? SQL Server has added compound operators......................................

Deep Fried Bytes: Episode 3: Twitter War Stories

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:31:06 GMT

A group of Twitter power users met up on the last day of the TechEd 2008 Conference. They sat down with Deep Fried Bytes host and Twitter user Keith Elder to discuss their ideas, experiences and observations of the online service. Each person has their own reason for using Twitter but they all share a common theme. They all use Twitter to keep in touch with their friends and stay connected to keep relationships thriving.

Animation in-depth with Silverlight 2.0 Beta - Part Five

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:31:02 GMT

In the last part I've shown how the VideoBrush can be used and videos can be animated by dividing MediaElement into two parts. In this demonstration of Silverlight animation I'll focus on transitional animation. We've seen this type of animation many times in movies, television commercials, music videos, in sting which we see at the beginning of any news. The wipe effect and dissolves are mostly used in film and television. There are other effects which fall into the category of wipe and dissolves.

Preserving Routes for SEO using the MVC Routing Engine

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:31:02 GMT

Short screencast showing how to preserve routes for SEO using the MVC Routing Engine

A jQuery Client Status Bar

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:46:03 GMT

Status bars are very useful in client applications to display well status information and having a reusable and easily callable and configured status component to display messages is extremely handy. Here's an implementation that uses jQuery plus a bit of CSS to make short work of displaying status content.

15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:16:14 GMT

Response times, availability, and stability are vital factors to bear in mind when creating and maintaining a web application. If you're concerned about your web pages' speed or want to make sure you're in tip-top shape before starting or launching a project, here's a few useful, free tools to help you create and sustain high-performance web applications.

Rich domain modeling with Visual Studio 2008

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:16:03 GMT

LightSpeed 2.0 includes a powerful visual domain model designer that has support for database round tripping (auto update on schema changes, push model changes to the database), creates .NET 2.0 compliant or .NET 3.5 compliant code depending on the target framework of your project and customizable code generation templates. Drag and drop database support for SQL Server, Oracle, My SQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL is also supported right out of Visual Studio 2008. Free version available.

Functional C# - Unfolding Lists

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:01:03 GMT

Very nice post on implementing ideas from functional programming with C#.

Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:01:03 GMT

As anybody who has run a growing website or blog knows, response time is going to get worse with the more users you have visiting your site. The users come from all angles, RSS feeds, homepage visits, search engine visits, people sealing your static files that you host, and pretty much anything else that can be served over HTTP. The solution to this problem is to off load your static content on to a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN providers cost a lot of money though, so it is nothing for us mere mortals with one server can afford. But thanks to Google anyone can now run their own CDN for free on Googles servers. Lucky for you and me Google has made the process really painless and you can even have the CDN under you own domain name. In my case static.coderjournal.com.

Unit tests are for functionality, not code!

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:31:02 GMT

Unit tests are meant to test functionality, NOT code! That means if you write your unit tests after the fact, you're probably not focusing on the functionality.

Why You SHOULD Have 100% Code Test Coverage

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:46:02 GMT

Shawn talks about why your goal should be 100% unit test coverage, despite what others may say.

Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:31:02 GMT

In the first article of this series I talked about the problems with strings in code. This article will show you how you can use lambda expressions and expression trees as another tool to avoid strings

Nice VS 2008 Code Editing Improvements

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:16:02 GMT

Good improvements to take notice of when utilizing VS 2008

Nikhilk Kothari's site (almost) made XHTML valid

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:16:03 GMT

I decided to try and make good old Nikhilk Kothari's personal site a valid one. I didn't have access to the source code, so all changes were made on the rendered ASP.NET. Why Nikhilk? I don't know, I guess I just like his web site! Short and entertaining video.

MVC: Creating SSL Links/URLs

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:31:10 GMT

A couple days ago a reader sent in a question regarding how to use SSL with the MVC framework. Specifically the reader wanted to know the easiest way to make an Ajax call to a HTTPS page from a non HTTPS page. The tricky part here is to do so without hard-coding any URLs, so I whipped up a few extension methods that should make this a bit easier.