Here is an example of a singleton. No locks necessary. I would have posted in your blog, but I kept getting an error.

http://senfo.blogspot.com/2007/07/singleton-design-patter-in-c.html

This isn't a bad idea, but this wouldn't work in all situations.

For example, I am currently awaiting a 3rd party to write a web service that I will consume on my end. In the mean time, however, I would like to continue with development on my side. Having said all of this, the interface is most likely not ever going to exist on their side, so I'm forced to design the interface on my side.

So what I ended up doing was creating an interface, which defined the methods that my company, as well as the 3rd party, agreed upon. After that, I created a wrapper class, which implements my interface. Now, I simply create an object of type IMyInterface and initialize it using a factory method. As an added bonus, this will allow me to, for example, add a section to my web.config to be used for testing my web service at a later time, without having to recompile my code.

I thought you could supply your own custom prefix when the database was built. Maybe I'm thinking of something else.

What's with the use of the var keyword in this situation? Seems quite abusive.

Wow! Must be so exciting for Andrew Stopford to have found this. Congratulations!

You're kidding me. It's that easy? I tested it a few months ago and remember running into this. I never looked much into it because I ended up rolling out a custom control for the task. At any rate, this is great information to have on hand. Thank you!

Interesting. I had seen those methods, but never really thought much about them. Is it safe to assume that this will work for services?

Interesting results; however, I would like a LOT more technical detail. Also, just for my own personal knowledge, I would have loved to have seen the difference that stored procs made in comparison to inline SQL.

We need a way to report spam.

I'm amazed at the number of people that still think bitwise operations are a thing of the past. When used correctly, they're still very useful and extremely powerful.

That would be awesome, except that I can't afford TFS, which is why I use SVN in the first place! ;-)

Interesting. I never thought about search engines thinking of them as a duplicate. Thank you for sharing.

Awesome list. I'm just getting started in WPF and I feel like I've almost been overwhelmed with all the tools. Thank you for sharing.

gavinjoyce, could you maybe point out some issues that you've had with ClickOnce? Personally, I have never written an installer that used ClickOnce deployment --I've only used applications, such as Paint.NET that took advantage of the technology. However, in my limited exposure, I have been nothing but pleased.

Very nice work. Personally, I'd never be able to match the design qualities of these applications because I'm so un-artistic, it's pathetic!

Interesting because I have never heard the argument that developers prefer to design web sites over desktop applications.

As a developer, I have designed both desktop applications, as well as web sites in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and even CGI. ASP.NET has made web development a lot more interesting because of its event driven model. I no longer how to worry about spending time writing JavaScript to take care of round trips to the server. It's almost exactly like programming a Windows application.

However, that said, I have to agree with the author of this article. Designing desktop applications is far more interesting, to me. Essentially, I agree with the author on every point, so I won't repeat anything, but I will say, that it is unfortunate that my experience with the end user is what ultimately forces many developers to design applications that run on a website.

For example, a lot of end users hate the idea of having to install software. Honestly, I'm not sure why. But many of my clients love that we can deploy to a web server and the application is instantly available to anybody within the organization that has a web browser. In addition to the ease of deployment, web applications are a lot easier to update because it usually (in my case) involves only updating two computers (the web server and the database server).

There are, however, great technologies that should be making desktop applications more appealing. Unfortunately, these technologies haven't gotten much attention. For example, One Click Deployment is a great idea because it permits applications to have to be manually installed only once. After that, the client can be designed to upgrade itself if an update is available. Computers can even be configured to permit non-administrators to perform these upgrades. One great example of this idea is the Paint.NET application.