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 or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Microsoft BizTalk, Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and other related Microsoft tools and ......
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 of the tools that are available. I'm not here to say that .NET can solve world peace, but enterprise software applications can be rapidly developed, ......
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 new being provided by the Tools CTP, so I started a simple C# Console Application. From the Add New Item menu, I noticed an ADO.NET Entity Data ......
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 freezing the window itself. To load the items into the combobox, which I'd like to do at runtime, I'll use the Loaded event on the combobox. <ComboBox ......
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 and executes just fine, but there was no idication of that method existing. Now how could that be? Could I have missed something? Obviously I did ......
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 the fact that in July of '08 he'll be moving from his fulltime position at Microsoft to working fulltime on his foundation. Having been employed with ......
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 - The object is actually passed by value, but the .Net Framework treats the copy as a reference to the original object. Changes made to the copy ......
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.... Next FullName becomes a ReadOnly Property here and acts as if it belonged to the Customer class. Now, say we take out the first field in the select ......
This weekend I read quite possibly one of the most influentual books so far in how I personally look at software development - 'Object Thinking' by David West. I think this book (along with The Pragmatic Programmer) should be on every developers bookshelf. David West, Ph.D., a professor at New Mexico Highlands School of Business, teaches an object-based curriculum and currently developing an innovative software development apprenticeship program based on agile principles. In this book he attempts ......
So Monday (11/19/07) marked the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 and Framework 3.5. There's so many new features. I already feel way behind. I started playing with some of the language enhancements to Visual Basic 9. My aren't we growing up! All object-oriented languages have some similarities to some degree, but Microsoft has been taking leaps forward into making its OO languages more robust with each version of the framework. The first that I had to sit down and code something for myself to grasp is the ......
I suppose that I should first introduce myself. My name is John Saunders and I live in the Charlotte, NC, USA area. I'm a software architect specializing in Microsoft .Net based distributed systems. Consulting for several companies in the southeast, I advise and assist in development of cutting-edge solutions for Windows desktops, servers, mobile devices along with service oriented frameworks and data warehousing implementations. My language of choice would have to be VB.Net though I'm constantly ......