September 2011 Entries

Speeding up ForEach loops with parallel programming - Task Parallel Library

If you're working with large chunks of data, eventually you'll probably use a foreach loop to iterate through an enumerable data source and execute the same actions on each item (for example, do something to every DataRow in a DataSet). With the new Task Parallel Library (TPL) in .Net 4 you can execute these loops in parallel for a noticeable improvement in speed. .Net has had support for parallel programming since the 1.0 version, but the developer had to do (sometimes...) extensive work to create...
Posted On Monday, September 26, 2011 12:15 PM | Feedback (0)

Dallas event: AT&T Mobile App Hackathon

Saturday, November 5, 2011 at the AT&T Foundry in Plano, TX Dev-ing. Mobile. Cloud. APIs. Good food. Awesome prizes. Interested in building your own app? This hackathon will introduce you the the latest cutting edge tools to deploy your own app with a website backend, fully hosted in the cloud. Alternatively, you can come pitch your idea and scout for developer talent, who can help you build your app! Mobile App Hackathon is an event produced by the AT&T Developer Program and Apigee that...
Posted On Wednesday, September 21, 2011 11:53 AM | Feedback (0)

Review of InRule v 4.0 Business Rule Authoring system

I’ve worked with the BizTalk Rule Engine and various rule systems using Windows Workflow Foundation with varying degrees of success, so I was interested in seeing InRule’s solution, billed as “The Premier .NET Solution for Authoring, Managing and Executing Business Rules”. The company has been around since 2002, and lists AirTran Airways, Trane and Experian among its customers. Product Components of InRule InRule has multiple components for authoring, storing and executing rules, each of which can...
Posted On Monday, September 19, 2011 12:09 PM | Feedback (1)

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview released

The Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview was released to MSDN subscribers yesterday, and will be available in general release tomorrow (9/16). There's way too many new features to list them all here (for all the product highlights go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... but here are a few that interest me the most: Enhanced multi-monitor support .NET Framework regular expression syntax in Find and Replace IntelliSense enhancements for JavaScript JavaScript breakpoints...
Posted On Thursday, September 15, 2011 10:05 AM | Feedback (0)

Tulsa event: Tulsa TechFest October 7th, 2011

What is Tulsa TechFest? It is a technical conference with currently the broadest topics in the United States, maybe the world. There are tracks covering everything enterprise architecture, software/web development, databases, project management, data security and this year for the first time - End Users, Social Media, Mobile, Enterpreneurs, Managers, BI & Reporting, Virtualization and Mentoring. It's primary focus is to provide training/teaching sessions that are immediately benefical to the...
Posted On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 1:26 PM | Feedback (0)

Dallas event: Windows Phone Camp

What's a Windows Phone Camp? A free, full day event chock-full of everything you need to know to develop a Windows Phone application. Whether you're a seasoned veteran or just getting started with .NET development this full-day event is for you. Interested in profit? We'll also lead discussions on how to monetize your applications and generate profits with your apps. Don't miss the new Windows Phone 7.5 (codename "Mango") features as well - with detailed sessions in the afternoon around Fast Application...
Posted On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 9:52 AM | Feedback (0)

Calculate distance between two latitude/longitude points in SQL

I'm working on a mobile location search app, and needed a way to find addresses within a certain radius of the device's current position. A little Googling found a simple function that will return the distance in miles: CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Distance( @lat1 float , @long1 float , @lat2 float , @long2 float) RETURNS float AS BEGIN DECLARE @DegToRad float = 57.29577951 DECLARE @Ans float = 0 DECLARE @Miles float = 0 SET @Ans = SIN(@lat1 / @DegToRad) * SIN(@lat2 / @DegToRad) + COS(@lat1 / @DegToRad )...
Posted On Thursday, September 08, 2011 8:44 AM | Feedback (1)