POCO Entities in ADO.NET 4.0 - One of the most anticipated features of the Entity Framework 4.0 is the ability to have POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) entities. This allows developers to produce domain objects free of any persistence baggage, with no requirements imposed inheritance-wise. Up till now entity objects were required to either inherit EntityObject or had to implement IEntityWithKey, IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships. This makes it far easier to use EF with legacy domain classes and keeps data models clean and unconcerned with their own persistence. To demonstrate this feature I'll start out with a basic SQL Server table structure and test data that maps employees to departments. Database create table Departments ( Department_ID int identity primary key clustered, Name varchar(255) not null ) create table Employees ( Employee_ID int identity primary key clustered, FirstName varchar(255)...
Parallel Programming with the Task Parallel Library and PLINQ in .Net 4.0 - It's no secret that parallel computing is becoming more important. As clock speeds have stagnated and the number of cores per die have increased one thing has become clear. Software developers have to adapt to the current state of processors by writing code that's more parallelizable. In the past many programmers have avoided parallel processing when possible mainly due to its complexity even in the face of an obvious increase in throughput. Those that have parallelized have often done it poorly and suffered through some serious misery as a result. We're running out of options, though. In order to get more done faster we have to do more at once. Development platform providers have been scrambling lately to try to simplify parallel development and minimize the amount of work we'll have...
