AppFabric AutoStart feature is built on top of IIS 7.5 AutoStart feature. IIS 7.5 provides an extensibility point where you can specify your custom initialization providers which will be executed as part of application start-up and gives you the ability to perform costly initialization. For example,...

A.K.A. “Why won’t the workflow designer use my data template?” I was on site with a customer today writing some custom activities and found a problem that wasn’t immediately obvious how I could get around it (and indeed it’s taken me some hours of head scratching and...

Phew – that was a long title! This is a follow-up to a post that my colleague Josh wrote recently. I started typing a comment in response to one of the comments and it got a little bit cramped in the text box so I decided to post it here instead. To summarise, Josh is looking into migrating...

I’m lucky enough to have sneaked on to some MVC training created and hosted by my talented colleagues Simon Ince and Stuart Leeks . For some time now I’ve threatened to migrate theJoyOfCode.com blogging engine from ASP.NET WebForms to MVC and this is the perfect excuse to make this happen...

Of course, the ThreadPool isn't actually dead - it's just hiding. Or at least it should be. Long live the Task Parallel Library. During my career I've got to play with some reasonably serious parallel challenges. As a result, I've posted a number of articles on this very subject in the past on this...

I am embarking in a series of mini post called .NET hidden gems, not necessarily new bits but usually unknown. They are dedicated to those small features and components that are not commonly used but can deliver interesting value in certain scenarios. Today I am going to show you some functions...

oI have been exploring different new features that come with the .NET 4, beyond the most popular ones like dynamic types and covariance; I was interested in performance enhancements. For this reason I am going to publish a couple of blog entries were I explore these different features. Memory mapped...

The very first talk I gave on .NET was on custom attributes – some time way back in late 2000 or early 2001. At the time I was espousing the benefits of using custom attributes to add on details of unit tests and bug fixes. There have been many additions to .NET since then and I spied a couple of...

Another interesting new feature of the CLR 4 comes from the Garbage collection team. On this version, they are adding some performance enhancements on the memory allocation process. The feature is commonly called “Background GC”. But what does it actually mean? As applications are starting to consume...

This post by Pedram looks at Parallel Extensions in the .NET Framework, to view other posts by Pedram visit his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/pedram/ There is no escaping from concurrency challenges... or is there? (A slightly modified version of this article was published in the August 2008 edition...

First post on the blog by Mehran, in this post he gives us a guide to .NET Application Architecture. If you have been using the .NET Framework since its first version, you may remember the Application Architecture for .NET guide, which was published back in 2002. Most of the subjects covered in this...