Contents tagged with Nullable

  • Ales Holecek: Windows 8 Unplugged

    Jan 16 2013 6:12 PM

    Ales Holecek opened the day at the p&p symposium this morning with a keynote address on Windows 8. Here are my live blogging notes that contain a mixture of his comments and my own commentary as he went along. Holecek is in charge of WinOS 8. He said that mobility was the primary driver for them when they started thinking about WinOS 8 back in 2009. Given that they promoted touch to a first-class citizen. Future releases will be optimized around touch. The holy grail for a future OS is speech but we're not there yet. Continue reading...

  • Greg Young on CQRS

    Jan 15 2013 8:52 PM

    When Greg Young's talk on CQRS began I was prepared for a long look at patterns, reliability, transactions, MQs with Azure, WCF, and interface contracts and how Microsoft products were the best way to get you from Point A to Point B. But I was wrong. He showed no code. He didn't mention Azure once. In fact, he didn't talk about specific tooling or tech stacks at all. Continue reading...

  • ScheduleWidget Is Now Open Source

    Sep 24 2012 11:44 PM

    I had no idea that in the few short months since ScheduleWidget went live on NuGet it would be so popular. That tells me that other devs have a real need for the tool just like I did in my own project. That's the good news. The bad news is the feature requests are coming in and I can't support it alone. So she's going open source! I've created a repo and done the initial commit into GitHub. The repo on github.com is here. When I have time there are two features that I want to add: Continue reading...

  • ScheduleWidget 2.0 Released

    Jun 16 2012 2:23 AM

    Without much fanfare I'd like to announce the release of ScheduleWidget. ScheduleWidget is a .NET 4.0 scheduling engine that handles recurring events for calendars. I was influenced by Martin Fowler's white paper "Recurring Events for Calendars" in which he describes the broad software architecture for a recurring events scheduling engine. But I did not find any implementation of his idea in the wild. So this led me to write it myself. It is available as a nuget package here: Continue reading...

  • JQuery Mobile Madness with MVC 4 Web API

    May 23 2012 10:48 PM

    In my last post I introduced MVC 4 Web API. In keeping with the spirit of things I'd like to throw a little JQuery Mobile into the mix for fun. As in my previous blog post fire up Visual Studio 11 Beta and create a new MVC 4 Web API project. Last time we posted a plain old string value back to the ValuesController. Now let's post a Widget class back. Go ahead and add this model to the project: Continue reading...

  • Seismic Shifts in Web Development

    May 10 2012 4:56 PM

    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 11:41 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 6:23 PM

    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 9:51 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 23 2012 2:27 AM

    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 7:35 PM

    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...

  • Snuggle up to jquery $.ajax

    Jun 18 2011 9:49 AM

    In an earlier post I described how to use the MVC 3 Ajax.ActionLink to post an async delete back to the server. Ajax.ActionLink depends upon jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js, a script included with the MVC 3 project template. As Brad Wilson has blogged, and I demonstrated, you create an AjaxOptions class and pass it into the ActionLink method constructor. When the view is rendered those properties are emitted with the anchor tag as HTML 5 data-* attributes: Continue reading...

  • Simple and Custom Validation in MVC 3

    Jun 5 2011 12:03 PM

    This is the first of a series on validation and business rules in MVC 3. I'll start out simple and we'll work out way up to the more complex. I'm going to build on the solution created in the previous blog post (Delete Like a Rock Star) so go there and get set up. Continue reading...

  • Delete Like a Rock Star with MVC3, Ajax and jQuery

    Jun 3 2011 10:42 AM

    Sure you can be a chump and use the out-of-the-box delete functionality that the MvcScaffolding gives you. Or you can use a little jQuery and delete like a rock star. Get your project set up first. Create a new MVC3 web app in Visual Studio 2010. If you have SP1 you have a choice now: internet or intranet. I'll assume we're creating an internet app but it doesn't matter really. Next add a new model called Widget: Continue reading...