Hopefully all you application Developers know about Enterprise Library, and how it can save you development time and effort for commonly-performed task like database connections and logging. Well, prepare to have even more time and effort saved: Enterprise...

I'm an avid shutterbug and had the opportunity to explore some of Delhi, India's points of interest last weekend. I found myself with plenty of time while I was at one particular location - the 500 year old tomb of Isa Khan Niyazi (near to Humayun's Tomb...

Those who know me will be familiar with my quest to avoid writing boring code using any tool that generates it for me (like CodeSmith + NetTiers or Software Factories). Thus it was with great excitement that I recently came across another one! It's called...

When building WCF Services it's very useful to know how long the individual operations within it's various methods are taking that are outside of the Service itself e.g. calls to other services or to databases as the question is often asked, "Why is this...

If you need to make more than one call to one or more web services in your code in a single request, then you can do this using multiple threads for vastly better performance. There are three ways of solving this problem, depending upon which layer...

"Terrarium" is a project Microsoft created with .NET 1.0 that allowed devs to write a bug or plant and have it live, fight and eat in a little digital world called Terrarium. This world connected to other instances running on other folks PC's and your...

Saw this today and thought this intesting: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645013.aspx Bits and a sample are available: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/cc655792.aspx Until now the only caching option from Microsoft has been...

I saw these Webcasts coming up this month and think they might be of interest to a lot of folks (all times are Eastern time): · June 16th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect Web Cast series http://msevents.microsoft...

Today there a bunch of new bits to play with that have up until now been a collection of individual CTP's - yes it's the first beta of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1! This is more interesting than many betas as there a lot of...

If you're creating Web Services using WCF (or ASMX, for that matter) then you are, of course, using the Web Service Software Factory to create them (right?). Well one thing the WSSF does not include is the hooks to the various blocks within the Enterprise...

If you're developing Features for SharePoint then you will have discovered what a laborious process it is getting from the compiled dll, Feature.xml etc in Visual Studio to a deployed Feature in your SharePoint Dev environment. The least painful way I...

If you like tools that make creating your data layers easier (like NHibernate or code generation tools like Codesmith & NetTiers ), you might be interested in the latest release from the ADO.NET team - the Entity Framework (EF). The latest release...

I learned today that there was a book published a few months ago on two of my favourite technologies, the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) and the Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF): Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart...

This took me longer than it should have to get working as the things I tried first compiled but did nothing: myList.Folders.Add("DoesNotWork", SPFileSystemObjectType.Folder); The way I got it to work in the end was like this: SPList myList = myWeb...

If you're a MOSS guy like me then you'll know all about the MOSS Software Development Kit - and how it could really use.. erm... filling out :-) Well an updated version of it has just been released (download it here or see it online here ), along with...

As you might know, the Web Service Software Factory includes a Data Access Guidance Package that can generate sprocs, entities and data access components from a database schema - great if, like me, you hate typing all this boring code yourself when you...

So you want to use the zip file format in your .NET 2/3/3.5 application? There is a compression namespace in .NET 2.0, of course; but it doesn't do zip, only deflate and GZIP (so you can't have multiple files in one archive). So to date I've always...

If you're testing out all the new features of VS 2008 (now in beta 2 ) then you might want to play with the latest CTP of Acropolis, which is the next version of the Composite UI Application Block (CAB), which if you're a WinForms developer you are hopefully...

If you're like me, then you like figuring out how something is supposed to be done by looking at a really good example. Complete, full-blown, high-performance ASP.NET Enterprise Client-Server Application examples are rather few and far between. In...

Happy July 4th! As a Brit, I kindov don't celebrate July 4th in the US, so much... :-) However did you know that we British celebrate July 4th on Thanksgiving?? Just kidding! :-D Well of interest today is a new Acropolis CTP, just released. ...

If you're writing winforms ("smart client") apps, then hopefully you're aware of the Smart Client Composite UI Application Block ( CAB ), a free, community-supported toolkit released in December 2005 by the Patterns & Practices group ( PAG ) to assist...

Hello, Just published to MSDN: a handy little WPF app that places in one place lots of the resources you need to know about for developing Office applications (which includes, in particular, MOSS). If you have the .NET Framework 3.0 installed...

Most of us still have to commute to the office, and some of us have to travel a fair bit, and a great way for us techies to get more from this time (other than sleeping!) is to listen to audio shows on interesting technical subjects. I have listened to...

Caching frequently-accessed data is often desirable in Winforms/Smart Client applications in order to maximise performance because reading a value from a well-designed cache can be less expensive, and/or provide fault tolerance (permitting limited off...

I thought you might be interested in quickly learning the essentials of the upcoming Microsoft technology for creating compelling user interfaces within the browser for your custom applications (think Flash-like apps) – it’s called WPF/e (Windows Presentation...