DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by rev4bart

PDC 2008 - Silverlight 2 Wrap-Up

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 07:19:17 GMT

PDC (Professional Developer Conference) 2008 is over. There has been a lot of information released last week that you may have missed, particularly for Silverlight. This article summarizes all the resources released for Silverlight during the PDC in one single place. If you haven't heard about the new Silverlight Tools released last week, new Silverlight Control Toolkit, Silverlight 2 videos from the PDC, Silverlight 2 Mobile information, WCF REST Starter Kit check this article out.

Software Tools You Should Be Using and Blogs You Should Be Reading

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:01:02 GMT

Advice on how to become a great developer and not just a monkey programmer.

Silverlight 2 for Mobile - Why you should start using a MVC pattern

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:08:13 GMT

Silverlight 2 for Mobiles has been announced. Here is a quick post on how the MVC pattern can help your save you time and enable you to target the Mobile platform faster.

Silverlight & ASP.NET MVC vs Web Forms (Very High Level)

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:34:05 GMT

A high level Pros and Cons look at Silverlight vs ASP.NET Web Forms (based on pros/cons offered by ASP.NET MVC)

Tips, Tricks, and Hidden Gems In SQL Server 2005/2008

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:41:05 GMT

Browsing stackoverflow for SQL Server tags has now become a habit that I do on my free time. For some reason I missed this interesting post about Hidden Features in SQL Server.

The Software Developer's Dream

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:09:54 GMT

Tom Preston-Werner, one of the founders of GitHub , wrote an enlightening article about his decision to turn down 300K bonus from Microsoft in order to work on the GitHub project one year ago . A beautifully written article. I love it absolutely.

QuakeLight, the Silverlight port of Quake, is coming...

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:01:09 GMT

QuakeLight - Silverlight Port of Quake... 3D with Silverlight - w00t!

Silverlight news for October 22, 2008

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:30:05 GMT

Jeff Prosise's next trick is already a fact and it is about factoring of applications in Silverlight. It explains how to load assemblies dynamically and how to instantiate types from that assemblies using Silverlight ...

Silverlight - ready for business applications?

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:12:05 GMT

Since the Silverlight 1.1 was released I and my colleagues started using it in a commercial business applications for some small tasks, where the benefits were obvious. Even the fact the Expression Blend crashes and the lack of controls at that time didn't stop us. We were impressed of the temp of the improvement and we expected to see reliable and ready for business use platform when the final is released. So, now the final is a fact, but is it really ready for real-world business application? Shortly - no. Not yet.

Silveright 2 GUIMark - Big Performance Boost in Silverlight 2 RTW

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:32:12 GMT

GUIMark is one of the few independent benchmarks out there that compare several web/RIA technologies. Back in Silverlight 2 Beta days, Silverlight was serving up a paltry 7-8 FPS. With Silverlight 2 RTW out, I updated the original code to get it to work and there are dramatic improvements to the rendering pipeline inside Silverlight 2 RTW. Check out the article for details.

Silverlight and the Enterprise

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:28:03 GMT

This article is about Silverlight and Enterprise level development. Included are some ways Silverlight is a better suited RIA for enterprise development than Flash/Flex or JavaFX.

Software Entrepreneurship Track - Tracking a Microsoft .NET based star

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:23:21 GMT

This article covers the reality TV show Start-Up Junkies. The show includes lots of .NET goodness and with the power of the internet you get a lot more background information on their partnership with MIcrosoft. There is a lot of information here for anyone working in a Microsoft based startup.

Silverlight 2 RC0 - Important

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:15:30 GMT

Silverlight 2 RC0 is out. This is a condensed list of the most important new items you should know about RC0 and some important new trends Microsoft doing with Silverlight. This isn't your simple Beta 1 -> Beta 2 upgrade.

Quick American Advice For Imported and Outsourced Software Engineering

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:31:57 GMT

Interesting and controversial read!

Silverlight Opportunity: Challenging the game concept model (Spore)

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:39:18 GMT

How Silverlight & RIA technologies can challenge professional game development shops by focusing on novel concepts and add value beyond just graphics. Detailed insight focuses on the newly released game Spore.

Tip of the Day #25: How to Build the XAP File another Folder

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:27:14 GMT

By default when you build your Silverlight application you will notice the XAP file is placed in your web sites ClientBin folder:

Silverlight advantages over Flash (not another Silverlight vs Flash)

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:37:27 GMT

The article lists the advantages of Silverlight 2 over Flash. The focus of the article is current technology offerings and future enhancements to Silverlight that make it a better choice for RIA development over Flash.

Silverlight 2 Tools, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Instal

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:28:22 GMT

How to install SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 SP1 together on one development workstation. The article provides step by step instructions and all the necessary download links.

Undocumented Linq! .NET 3.5 SP1 Gold Forgot to mention you might break

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:59:11 GMT

Undocumented Linq! .NET 3.5 SP1 Gold Forgot to Mention these Critical Changes that might Break your Code BREAKING CHANGE: Cast<T> Behavior Also, a new implementation recognizes queries that apply Where and/or Select to arrays or List<T> and fold pipelines of multiple enumerable objects into single specialized enumerables. According to Dinesh Kulkari at Microsoft this enhancement: "..produces substantial improvement in base overhead of common LINQ to Objects queries (at times 30+%)."

Obscure Knowledge: The Levenshtein Distance

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:20:24 GMT

Recently while trying to complete my goal of reading the entire Interwebs, I stumbled upon something I thought the rest of you might be intrigued by: The Levenshtein Distance.

What's wrong with SOAP? - REST and .NET 3.5 Part 1 - why REST based se

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:31:03 GMT

SOAP vs REST

Behind the Scenes at Microsoft.com

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:01:02 GMT

Learn how the Microsoft.com operations team meets the demands for one of the top 5 websites on the Internet today. The team supports the server product teams at Microsoft by "dogfooding" products such as Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and IIS7 years before being released to customers. Keith and Woody sit down with Brad LeRoss and Jim Dobbin of the MSCOM team discuss the Microsoft.com architecture and infrastructure, history of the team, the process of content delivery and a few funny stories.

Concepts To Become A Silverlight Master (Series Part 4 - Security).asp

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:32:47 GMT

Part 4 of the Silverlight Master Series addresses the important concept of security and how it impacts Silverlight application design.

Faster Than Reflection - Lambda Almighty

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:54:36 GMT

In my previous post Using Lambdas To Write A Faster Factory I was demonstrating a neat use of lambdas in conjunction with a dictionary to create a concise and quick factory pattern. Since then I've found some other really nice uses for lambdas and stumbled across some other LINQ related goodness. In this post, I'm going to demonstrate a way to use Lambdas in place of reflection for reading and writing values at runtime and run some performance numbers by you.

Silverlight 2.0 - Concepts To Become A Silverlight Master (Part 3)

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:16:03 GMT

Part 3 of the Silverlight Master Series focuses on Expression Blend and its importance in the Silverlight design process.