September 2008 Entries
Visual Studio Magazine has a nice article that gives a good intro and 360-degree view of MS’s “cloud” data services offerings. These are now available for use via the VS 2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 release. http://visualstudiomagazine.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=2469 There are a lot of individual, but related offerings coming from MS under the “… Data Services” umbrella. In general, they are MS’s cloud computing and REST based technologies. These technologies are common for public services on the web since they are simple to use and based on widely accepted standards. I’m not yet clear on how these will be used...
Great stuff: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/pages/entity-framework-faq.aspx
I found a pretty nice webcast on LINQ to SQL from Teched. It's a 400 level session that goes into some of the challenges in creating "real world" applications with LINQ to SQL.
http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/webcasts/TLA402/#9
Tony discusses a few different "real world" scenarios:
1. Using LINQ to SQL with a distributed, service-based system.
2. Handling change tracking (what was updated / inserted / deleted) by the client code.
3. Concurrency
4. Injecting business logic
5. Using stored procs
He does a very nice job of showing how things work and covers most of the topics in sufficient details to get the point across. He also...
There's an issue with WCF proxies that is starting to get some (negative) attention. It has to do with the fact that WCF proxies can throw an exception when they are disposed. There are a number of posts on the net about this, so I won't go into details here. Microsoft has an article on this issue: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa355056(VS.85).aspx Tony Seed has a good article that shows a nice way to fix this, including a code snippet. http://blog.tonysneed.com/?p=86
I just signed up on Twitter. It looks kinda fun. http://twitter.com/nathanaw
John Nastase sent me the following information on ViewState. I found it very helpful in understanding the inner workings. http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2006/08/03/Truly-Understanding-Viewstate.aspx The article is pretty in depth, but it explains things very well. Definitely worth a read. Thanks John!
One of the “Desert Island” picks from a recent “This Week on Channel9” episode mentioned a pretty cool utility that lets you share a keyboard and mouse between two computers without using a KVM switch. It’s a software based solution that you run on the primary and any other computers that you’re sharing. You can share many many computers if you want. In my case, I have a laptop and a desktop. I wanted to have a single keyboard, but not have to worry about a kvm switch. The software is called Synergy. You can get it at...