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Archives / 2012

  • Seismic Shifts in Web Development

    May 10 2012 9:56 AM

    Not really. But then again really. What I mean is the role of the web developer is changing fast and it's only been in recent months that I've looked up from my keyboard to see how the ground has shifted substantially. Some developer friends and I have often joked that the back end -- the database, object-relational mapping, domain model, business logic, and the controllers for the UI -- take us about a fraction of the time it takes us to get the UI right. We will sit for hours just to get the HTML right, float div tags, give up and go with the table tag, try again, move on, and so on and on. And now with awesome tools like EF and LINQ it's a breeze to do the sort of plumbing work that used to take weeks.  Continue reading...

  • Pattern Toolkit Builder (VSPAT)

    Mar 13 2012 4:41 PM

    A few days ago Jezz Santos at Microsoft Consulting announced the release of Pattern Toolkit Builder (VSPAT) for Visual Studio 2010. Why not VSPTB? I think PA originally stood for "pattern automation" and the marketing folks just haven't nailed this down yet. Anyway, this promises to be the sort of game changer I've been looking for in my organization. I remember the software factory idea that the P&P team worked on a few years ago. It sort of died on the vine. The idea with pattern automation or "software factories" is that a very senior developer can create interactive, prescriptive (or merely helpful), project templates that junior developers can use to get started on a new project. The toolkit lets you create guidance and proven patterns in the actual code that gets unpacked from the project template so that junior developers aren't faced with the "blank slate how-do-I-get-started" problem.  Continue reading...

  • IncludeMetadataConvention Deprecated in EF 4.3

    Feb 16 2012 10:23 AM

    In an earlier blog post I showed how to remove the IncludeMetadataConvention convention from your DbContext configuration. This is necessary up through EF 4.2 to prevent model metadata changes from being written to the database, something you don't want for legacy systems. Beginning with EF 4.3 this pluggable convention has been deprecated. As posted on the ADO.NET team blog: Continue reading...

  • Polling with Knockout, JQuery, AJAX, and MVC

    Feb 1 2012 1:51 PM

    Some colleagues and I have been taking a close look at Knockout, the javascript library that implements the MVVM pattern for rich client UI. Knockout takes advantage of the new custom data attributes (data-*) in HTML 5 to bind declaratively a javascript view model to UI elements. That's pretty cool. But even better, Knockout will update your UI automatically whenever the underlying view model changes. It does this when you declare your model as an observable: Continue reading...

  • ChannelFactory, IDisposable and Handling Faults

    Jan 22 2012 6:27 PM

    In my last post (Poor Man's Publish-Subscribe WCF Service) I used the ChannelFactory to build a communication channel that I could use to call a WCF service. There's something about that implementation that I wanted to explain in more detail. Notice the try-catch block surrounding the using statement: Continue reading...

  • Poor Man's Publish-Subscribe WCF Service

    Jan 19 2012 11:35 AM

    I'm going to describe a WCF implementation of a publish-subscribe pattern that is used here at a medium-sized organization where I'm a lead developer. For reasons I won't go into MSMQ and the cloud were not options for us. Yet we needed durability, reliability, and all of the goodness that comes with a service bus. So we rolled our own "poor man's" pub sub (or observer pattern) service a simplified version of which I'll describe here. Continue reading...