You can always move to SubSonic. The 3.0 release is coming.

I created a simple jQuery plugin last week to do this with much less effort.

http://www.smallsharptools.com/Downloads/jQuery/

Look at the title watermark page. Just two lines of code for the whole page.

I think WCF has been the most used when compared to WPF and WF. I use WCF quite often but sometimes I have to go back to .NET 2.0 which means using .asmx services. WCF is a big beast though with many very precise features. It would be great to see that supported fully in Mono because WCF really is just a WS-* implementation which is meant to work well with Java and other platforms. The other technologies do not present the save cross-platform value. Being able to deploy a WS-* service under Mono (and vice versa with .NET to Mono) which is consumable by other languages and platforms would serve the Linux/Gnome platform in a positive way. And being able to consume WS-* services in the cloud which are published with Java, .NET or other platforms would allow for more cloud integration.

M.Gorney you seem quite biased. You may be surprised to know that the IE8 team is doing something very similar with tabs to isolate crashing pages in those tabs from crashing the other tabs and the browser. I look forward to more stability. But the best feature of Chrome that I plan to use it to create Application shortcut links to launch apps like Google Mail in an independent "application" to run by itself. With that feature combined with local storage with Gears you basically have a Smart Client. That is going to catch on as a killer feature combination.

My initial reaction was that this was just a marketing link, but after I read it through it does cover some good topics. I once had a sales guy at the company take over the web site and drop tons of stock photography onto the site and start selling .NET Nuke installations. It was all very cookie cutter even though our business was to do consulting with custom software development. I think the point made with this posting is very helpful. A shop that does custom software development should not have a bland web site.

Well, he did bring the content back to DNK and did the work to summarize the top 10.

I prefer not to have to reboot.

And where do you place a breakpoint so you can step through this? I see absolutely no value in placing 6 steps of execution onto a single line of code. Are we trying to save on disc storage? Are we you trying to fit more code onto our 19 inch screens? I do not thing lambdas have been around long enough for this to be considered readable. Developers know the try...catch coding style and are comfortable with it. This in no way is more efficient code when it comes to the runtime. Either way it will unfold it into the same set of CLR instructions so you gain nothing by reducing 6 lines of code to 1.

These sorts of posts about ASP.NET being unmaintainable are an exaggeration to me. I have seen time after time new frameworks created because some developers did not like a feature in the widely popular framework. And either they did not like the feature because it really had some problems or they did not understand how to work with it properly. I personally put very little code into my pages and code-behinds and export the vast majority of functionality to class libraries that I can unit test. No development pattern (MVC, MVP) will automatically prevent me from placing code where it should not be if I do not commit to keeping my code organized for maintainability. The over-reaction and false perception here is that ASP.NET is not 100% unit testable. In fact, if you do export most of your moving parts to class libraries, perhaps modular by their purpose, you can create a very maintainable web site with pretty complete code coverage. What MVC is sacrificing now is many benefits on the other end of the spectrum, like powerful server controls, productivity benefits of the design surface, etc. I hope that ASP.NET MVC does not swing too far on the side of the spectrum for unit testing and forget that many developers still want to leverage all of the existing productivity features.

I do not want the .NET framework and platform to start fragmenting like Java has done the last 10 years. There are many MVC frameworks in Java. How do you hire someone for your team that happens to know the one you are using? One major benefit of ASP.NET is that you pretty much all have the same IDE (VS) and if a developer has worked with the PostBack model they can be productive on day one. When I was working with Java and other languages I found that taking up maintenance for existing web sites started as a research project to figure out how it was built and then try to learn that framework and understand all the nuances of it. At least with ASP.NET it is the devil I know.

I think different kinds of applications have different priorities. Assuming every application has to be a multiple tier architecture is a failed assumption. But generally any widely used application that will be updated and released many times for more than the most brief period should be at least be modular enough to be flexible. A LINQ layer, perhaps a DataContext in a class library that features supporting classes to query the LINQ DataContext may be a sufficient data access layer. But I agree that calling into the DataContext directly from the UI layer is nearly always bad form.

When I throw together QA pages to simply display data in the staging and production environments I do directly bind them to tables in the database to completely bypass any business logic or complications in the data access layer in order to hopefully reveal the root cause of a bug. Still, I do like to lock down the database to only have EXEC rights on stored procedures and not even allow read access on the tables. Lately the projects I am on do not allow for that level of control in the data access layer. In the last project I actually used SubSonic. At least it provides a good level of compile-time protection because I always made use of the constants for the tables and column names in the queries.

I will wait for the final release with Unity, and see how I can mix that into ASP.NET MVC. Gonna be interesting stuff.

This article does not go into much detail. I believe the Mono project is more complete and has a larger developer community and it does not have a current and complete implementation of systems like ASP.NET. What they can implement more readily are the C# and CLI standards which are publicly documented. A full ASP.NET, WCF and LINQ implementation that runs on MacOS X and FreeBSD 7.0 would be great though. I personally run both FreeBSD and Windows servers for different purposes. Being able to drop some utilities on my FreeBSD box is something I do want to do. And simply having MSBuild run on FreeBSD and Windows would be a huge asset.

This is just the start of a research project with no apparent progress at this point. It could be a good 6 months before there is anything significant to show. This is a classic technique of getting people to hold out for your next big release with lots of promised features when there is a viable alternative available sooner. IBM, Sun, Apple and Microsoft have used these techniques for years. Remember all of the amazing features that were going to be in Vista a couple of years before the release that made it sound so much better than MacOS X? The same happened between Xbox and PS/3. Over-promise and under-deliver just to stifle the competition. A proposed idea of an amazing product can give you nearly the same competitive advantage as an actual product.

Nice work. I always thought this was a bit more work than necessary. Have any thoughts on doing something for files and streams in System.IO?

Chris, he is only famous around because you won't stop talking about him. :)

Now that he is a Veep we will never get him to Milwaukee to speak again.

Is this one one the list?

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesTitle/C-2008-For-Dummies.productCd-0470191090.html

Good for a gag gift.