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I just finished reading Release It by Michael Nygard. The book deals with the topic of having software in production. Over the years I've been on quite a few projects from the requirements phase through development and eventually production. (No, not all of them reached production) I can't give enough compliments about the book. The writing style is a brilliant mix of development related issues and "war" stories from Michael's own experiences. It covers both anti-patterns and...
We had an interesting problem the other day. In our database (SQL Server 2008) we have a few tables with possibly many millions of records. We send some of the data from these and related tables to a third party service for processing and get status reports back. The problem was that the reports that we get back cannot easily be correlated back to the original records in our database. Let’s say we have a person table and an address table with a 1:m relationship between person and address. The tables...
After a tough last week where I spent far too much time debugging encryption keys, I needed something to relax. I haven’t tweaked my Visual Studio color settings in a while (a couple of years) so I spent a couple hours today refining them. You probably don’t want to know what I do when I’ve had a really bad week. Ok, I’ll let you know. I put on some music I like and watch Defrag. Preferably at 2 AM. I don’t know who’s idiotic idea it was to remove the graphical defrag interface from Windows, but...
Recently I had to initiate some background worker in a Windows Service. Writing a Windows Service with the built in .Net support is a no-brainer. The thing that caught me by surprise was that all the documentation states that I needed to add an installer for the service to run. After a little looking around, it turned out that it is not so difficult to create your own custom installer. I ended up writing a small class that can handle any service and thought I’d share it here. The Windows Service...
I just read a post “Entity Framework - Disappointment” where a decision was made to ditch the EF because of some deficiencies. I want to emphasize that I know nothing about that specific project and the point of this post is not by any means to “attack” their approach. It is not my intention to pick on that specific post since I’ve seen similar complaints elsewhere. It did catch my attention though. I started with a comment, but it quickly became too long. My first reaction when I read the list was...
In my last post I explored a little about how we use the Entity Framework. One question that comes up a lot is how do you test your services with the data access layer without hitting the database. Not hitting the database during tests is not only a performance issue. Unless you build and tear down your data on every run you have to make sure the test data is consistent. So how do we do it? The first step is to create an in-memory version of the repository. This implementation will keep data in memory...
A lot has been written about L2S and the Entity Framework over the last few weeks since the announcement that the Microsoft Data Team will focus their efforts on the Entity Framework. A lot has also been written about all the deficiencies the Entity Framework has and that it is not ready for prime time. For us the Entity Framework has greatly simplified data access across the board. Data Access code is tedious, repetitive and boring. I don’t want to focus my energy on how to access data. It should...
I’m not going to say a word about which is better. Why? Because in the scope of things it doesn’t matter. But you have to wonder if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing inside Microsoft. (One hand being the C# team the other the VB.Net team – you can choose) I got up early this morning to watch the recording of Anders Heijlsberg’s presentation at the PDC on the future of C#. 14 minutes into the recording I had to stop because the kids were up. I’ll watch the rest tonight, but an impression...
The Model View Controller and Model View Presenter design pattern has been the source for a lot of confusion. Lately there has been a growing number of blog posts attempting to explain the when, what and why of this design pattern. Many developers unfamiliar to this pattern seem to be pushed back by the initial learning curve and complexity. I have been following much of what has been written on this topic both on online forums and on blogs. If you are unfamiliar with MVP and are doing UI development...
A topic that never seem to get old is the choice of your programming font. Every now and then major dev and tech blogs review and revisit font choices for programmers. Two weeks ago Jeff Atwood did a recap of good programming fonts. He did a pretty extensive review in 2004 as well. Scott Hanselman is another top blogger who often shares his opinions on choosing a font for Visual Studio. (There are so many posts on Fonts on Scott's site that there's no point in linking to them. Just go to...
It's been over a year since I started this blog. And I like it. I like the online presence it gives. I am gaining a few new contacts and friends and in general it's a cool thing. After the last blogger's meeting at the local Microsoft offices I was full of motivation. I have written more posts in the last week than the last 3 months. (Only 6, but anyhow) I signed up with Feedburner and I've been tracking stats. Slowly growing... Today I decided to check up on the number of page views...
I just finished reading through the latest version of Juval Lowy's C# Coding Standard which I picked up through Maor David's blog. Juval does make the point that the standard document emphasizes breadth as opposed to depth, but some things should be explained. I'm not claiming to be anywhere near Juval's level of expertise, but I think it is important to read experts opinions with a critical eye. There's at least one part of the standard that is IMHO either wrong or misleading...
A few posts ago I mentioned that I want to come up with a theme for a series of blog posts.
Here are my thoughts and It's important for me to hear what you think.
New technologies are sexy
...
For some time I have been subscribing to Sara Ford's blog where she shares useful tips for Visual Studio users. One of the tips she shared was using Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C (That is a Ctrl+K followed by a Ctrl+C) to comment out the current selection. Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U will do the reverse and remove the comment. Cool I thought, but not very useful to me since CodeRush lets you comment and uncomment using the ' in VB or the / in C#. But then I was in for a surprise. I do a lot of Xml configuration file...
You have just been assigned the task of writing the code to transfer base64 encoded files over the network. No big deal right. Just that the requirement didn't specify the size of the files. So full of ignorance you write the following code. (Ok, not you, but I did) Private Function FileToBase64( ByVal filePathName As String ) As String Dim contents As Byte () = My .Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllBytes(filePathName) Return System.Convert.ToBase64String(contents) End Function Everything looks ok and...