DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by turtlespin

Working with large domain models just got easier

Wed, 27 May 2009 12:15:00 GMT

One painful thing when working with design surfaces for domain models in most products is managing very large models. Hundreds or thousands of domain entities are difficult to manage visually. In this post Ivan details how Mindscape LightSpeed now includes filtering - filter for entities based on their name or even tag up your entities to create custom sub views. Particularly powerful is being able to show associated entities and filter by eager load graphs. Can't remember what entities are going to be pulled back by a certain load graph? Just filter it and see!

Starting out - The story of starting a software tools company

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:01:10 GMT

Not strictly about coding, this post talks about starting a business that builds tools for software developers (in this case, tools for developers on the Microsoft stack). Covers some of the lessons learned and experiences in the first few months.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 4: Model binding and easy validation

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:44:25 GMT

Part 4 of Jeremy Boyd's ASP.NET MVC 1.0 tutorial covers setting up your model bindings so that you can more easily validate your domain objects and present validation failures to your end users. It digs into using the xVal Framework with LightSpeed entities to simply validation concerns - bridging server side and client side validation.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 3: Setting up your website

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:37:15 GMT

In this third installment of Jeremy Boyd's tutorial on getting started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0, he covers setting up your website, where to manage your database connection, configuring your controllers and then driving data into your View.

ASP.NET MVC Tutorial Part 1: Creating the model

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:27:05 GMT

First in a series of blog posts by Jeremy Boyd on going end to end with the ASP.NET MVC framework 1.0. This post outlines setting up your domain model and outlines the intentions of the rest of the tutorials to follow - leveraging Ninject, JQuery, LightSpeed and NUnit.

Mindscape releases open source ASP.NET MVC extensions

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:01:03 GMT

Mindscape have released an open source library with a collection of helpful extensions to make developing solutions with the ASP.NET MVC framework easier. Attention has been paid to ensuring it's easy to deliver solutions based on LightSpeed but there is also significant samples and code for developers working on MVC solutions with other domain modeling tools. Patches and suggestions are welcome.

Comparing ORMs - LINQ-to-X, LightSpeed, EntitySpaces and OpenAccess

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:16:02 GMT

How do LINQ-to-SQL, LINQ-to-Entities, LightSpeed, EntitySpaces and OpenAccess stand up when compared to each other? This post discusses what to consider when selecting your O/R Mapper and links to a feature matrix comparing the features provided by each of these products.

LightSpeed 2.2 Released

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:31:11 GMT

LightSpeed 2.2 O/R Mapper has been released with support for SimpleDB, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, stored procedures support and much more. This post covers many of the new features, all of which are included in the free edition.

SimpleDB tools for Visual Studio

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:31:03 GMT

A new add-in which integrates Amazon SimpleDB into Server Explorer and enables you to view and edit SimpleDB data within Visual Studio is up. It also integrates with the LightSpeed ORM framework and designer.

Speeding up ASP.NET with the Runtime Page Optimizer

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:31:08 GMT

An great new tool to automatically optimize your ASP.NET website.

Free Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:31:03 GMT

The Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in (sexy name we know, but hey, it's self documenting) is a free Tool Window add-in for VS 2008 that provides a Windows Explorer style file system view. It's particularly useful for performing routine file system tasks without the need to "context switch" away from Visual Studio, which can be time-consuming over the course of days and weeks. It is shell-enabled so extensions like TortoiseSVN work too.

Elegant Invariant Checking with C# 3

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:16:03 GMT

Leveraging expression trees and extension methods to build a fluent invariant checking API.

Development Team Meetings - Keeping the Focus

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:40:54 GMT

Weekly team meetings are an essential part of any Development Team. Especially when team members are working on different projects and multiple locations. Keeping these meetings relevant and informative is crucial - people are busy and no-one wants their time wasted. I recently sent out an email expanding on the types of meetings we have and how people can participate - perhaps they will help your team when they get together.

Faster domain model development with schema round-tripping

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:01:02 GMT

Schema round-tripping is the ability for your domain model entities to be updated seamlessly when schema changes occur or, when your modify your model, for those changes to be propagated back to your database schema without any fuss. This article covers how to leverage schema round-tripping with LightSpeed 2.0's Visual Studio 2008 integrated domain design tool. This functionality is baked into every version, including the free express edition.

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.

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.

Leveraging LightSpeed specific features from LINQ

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:54:28 GMT

Post about accessing the powerful features that LightSpeed offers through the new LINQ provider supplied with LightSpeed 2.0. Specifically this article deals with leveraging the powerful Named Aggregates feature and Soft Delete functionality.

Sandcastle Removed From CodePlex

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:46:02 GMT

Sandcastle - the .Net community equivalent of RDoc/JavaDoc and the spiritual successor of the now defunct NDoc - has been removed from CodePlex. It's fate is currently up in the air and Microsoft is asking you for input on what should happen next.

When to use LINQ?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:16:03 GMT

Great, in-depth discussion of when it makes to sense to use LINQ in LightSpeed 2.0.

jQuery UI v1.5 Released

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:46:02 GMT

Focus on Consistent API and Effects

Introducing LINQ to LightSpeed

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:31:02 GMT

LightSpeed 2 incorporates LINQ (Language Integrated Query) support. LINQ to LightSpeed means that if you know LINQ, you can get these benefits without having to learn a new API. You can continue to write LINQ queries as if against LINQ to SQL or another LINQ provider, but you'll get database independence (effectively LightSpeed gives you LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to MySQL, LINQ to PostgreSQL and LINQ to SQLite as well as LINQ to SQL Server, all in the one box), advanced eager loading functionality (avoiding the so-called "n+1" problem which affects some LINQ implementations) and of course the blazingly fast LightSpeed query engine.

"Velocity" project - memcached by Microsoft?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:31:07 GMT

Is the Velocity project by Microsoft simply a me-too framework or are they creating real value for developers on the Windows platform?

Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:31:02 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now.

LightSpeed 2.0 Released

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:16:02 GMT

LightSpeed 2.0 has been released. It includes a full, round-tripping Visual Studio designer and support for LINQ!

Using the unit of work-per-request pattern in ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:01:03 GMT

Describe a simple, efficient and testable approach to implementing the unit of work-per-request (a.k.a session-per-request) pattern in Microsoft's new ASP.NET MVC framework.