Since MVC has been released I have observed much confusion about how best to construct view models. Sometimes this confusion is not without good reason since there does not seem to be a ton of info…

The .NET Base Class Library (BCL) has a wide array of collection classes at your disposal which make it easy to manage collections of objects. While it’s great to have so many classes available, it…

At the recent Calgary Tech Days event I did a presentation on building composite applications with WPF and Silverlight. One question that I get asked frequently when I get to the part of explaining…

I have been looking for a good first layer of validating an url to see if it is valid.

Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#. Today we will be looking at two set implementations in the System.Collections.Generic namespace: HashSet<T> and SortedSet…

Making ASP.NET AJAX calls to web services has become increasingly popular these days. This approach not only provides a good separation of concerns but also makes it possible to create a truly ajax…

In the web application I work on we sometimes need to create PDF documents based on some user input. In most cases, these documents are fairly simple and quick to create, allowing us to create the …

This handy MSDN blog post already details 8 (yes EIGHT) different ways to backup your SQL Azure Database. But the easiest technique of all, by scheduling a job using Windows Azure Mobile Services, …

I was sad to find out the “codingwithoutcomments” site was taken down. For the sake of a specific post from there, I went to waybackmachine.com and got that post, and I’m pasting it here.

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Here is another early release of the MVVM Light Toolkit V3 (Alpha 2). I decided to release gradually and early as soon as a new part of this new version is ready, to allow advanced users to install…

IIS Express is a new web server that replaces the old Visual Studio web server (aka Cassini). IIS Express provides a number of benefits which you can read about here and they key aspect is that it …

The SQL Azure Federation had been publically launched several weeks ago and this is one of the most existing features I’m looking forward. This might be the first post of SQL Azure Federation, and …

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C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is ha…

If you’re debugging Web service calls, you may want to capture incoming requests so you can see exactly what’s reaching the service. If BizTalk’s hosting the Web service, it’s a simple process of a…

\[South African Specific\]

Scott Hanselman has a post on his weblog about getting a shared network printer to work in DOS. That’s not really all that tough and actually got me thinking about a similar experience I had recently.

When creating my unit tests, I’ve been a big believer in the Object Mother pattern for creating state for my immutable value objects. Basically, I need to put the objects in a valid state in the co…