After nearly a year and a half, I've finally rolled off of leading an enormous project requiring the better part of my days/nights/weekends. While taking some time "on the bench" between assignments, I am happy to be able to return to blogging some of my findings, questions and random rants ......

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For those that haven't experienced Second Life, it is an online virtual world imagined and created entirely by its residents. Noticed that I said experienced, rather than played, since Second Life isn't really what you'd call a game. Best of all, Second Life doesn't cost a thing to experience (though owning land can be costly). Since it's 2003 launch, ......

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This will be the first in a series of articles covering Enterprise Application Development using the Microsoft .NET Platform. In this first article, I'd like to give you an understanding of the fundamentals of the Microsoft .NET Framework. This will lay groundwork for upcoming sessions covering object-orientation (OO), software design patterns, service-orientation ......

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Working as a consultant, I often find myself preaching the .NET gospel attempting to "save" my client's development teams. I've yet to see a team that hasn't been able to benefit from implementing Microsoft platform solutions, but initially there's a general vibe against drinking the cool-aid. Most of this push back stems from a lack of understanding ......

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Now that I'm feeling a bit more comfortable with LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML, I really wanted to begin exploring the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities. I started by going to msdn.microsoft.com/data and installed the ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 and ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools CTP 2 (for Beta 3). At first glance, I didn't notice anything ......

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In my last post, I talked about a hidden method on the Dispatcher associated with a WPF control to check if the current thread has access to the control. I thought that I would take a moment to explain how I actually used the CheckAccess() method. To start with, I have a combobox in a WPF window that I would like to load a list of categories into without ......

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Recently while exploring multi-threading with WPF, I came across a method on a WPF control's Dispatcher to check if the current thread has access to the control. myButton.Dispatcher.CheckAc... Now, the funny thing about this method is that it is a public method, but unavailble from Intellisense within Visual Studio. If manually typed in, it compiles ......

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After first giving the keynote address for the Computer Electronics Show almost 15 years ago, Bill Gates gave his final speech in Las Vegas on January 6th. Bill spoke about the past 10 years of software and where he sees the next "digital decade" taking us. He also took time to talk briefly about the fact that this would be his last CES keynote and ......

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Here's an interesting concept that I'm trying to sort out in my head.. Passing objects by value - creates a copy of the object and changes made to that copy aren't reflected in the original value. Passing objects by reference - passes a reference to the original object and changes made are reflected immediately. Passing Serializable objects by reference ......

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I've been playing around with LINQ to Objects and have come across something quite odd... Say we have this statement: Dim myCustomers = From customer In customers _ Where customer.Id = 5 _ Select customer.Id, _ FullName = customer.FirstName & _ " " & customer.LastName For Each customer In myCustomers.Distinct() Console.WriteLine(customer.... ......

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