Podcasts (Tuesday, May 26, 2009) - These days there are so many useful sources of information for software developers: websites, user groups, message boards, second life events, conferences, not to mention good old print mediums such as magazines and books. In the last few years another interesting means of content delivery has come into play with the proliferation of portable mp3 players... podcasts.
Linq to Object Performance (Monday, May 11, 2009) - Linq (specifically Linq to object) really has improved the "feel" and readability of .Net code by turning what we used to do with flow control, like loops and conditionals, into a query expression. Few people love tight code during development more than I, but I also have to support applications as they age. As the user base and application data grows performance
ironruby (Friday, April 11, 2008) - for the last year i've somehow been avoiding doing any ruby work. been writing plenty of python for prototyping as and duct tape for work as well as hobby, but nothing in the way of ruby. one of the reasons i've had the opportunity to write some python is because of ironpython. no matter how much diversity i would like in my professional development the truth is
POCO Entities in ADO.NET 4.0 (Thursday, July 30, 2009) - 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
Templating with NDjango (Sunday, September 06, 2009) - It never ceases to amaze me how many great open source tools and libraries have been ported to .Net. NUnit... NHibernate... NAnt... All incredibly widely adopted. Today, however I'd like to focus one that a coworker brought to my attention which may actually get some use at the office, NDjango. During my recent Django work I've become quite attached to Django's template
Now in IronRuby on Rails (Monday, May 17, 2010) - Just a quick note. I've again changed the architecture of this site. It's now in IronRuby on rails, running on Windows Server 2008 with SQL 2008 R2/Solr. Previously I was using django on linux with Oracle Express/Solr which was just one node in a long list of architectures I've used here. Why the change from django? Why the choice of IronRuby-microsoft-ish
Using Entity Framework with Oracle (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) - I've long thought that the Entity Framework hasn't gotten a fair shake. Sure, there's some room for improvement but for an out-of-the-box ORM that ships with the framework it's not too bad. One thing has always troubled me, though. I was never sure what kind of traction it had with data sources other than SQL Server. Recently in a project circumstances conspired
Exchange webdav automation (Tuesday, May 26, 2009) - Recently a situation arose where it would be very handy for me to write some code to automate some tasks dealing with exchange server that I'd have gone to CDO for in the past. I was basically trying to pull attachments out of unread mails with specific subjects and mark the owning mail as read. My first move was strait to CDO... Low and behold microsoft REALLY does
Scripting Your .Net Applications with IronPython (Tuesday, November 03, 2009) - At several points in my .Net development career I've had the need to make an application I wrote scriptable. Sometimes it was to provide easy product extension to customers or lower level information workers. Sometimes it was to ease maintenance of very fine grained logic that has the capacity to change frequently or unpredictably. But every time I found it to
Clojure, A Lisp for the JVM and CLR (Sunday, December 13, 2009) - I've been becoming increasingly interested in functional languages in the last few years and I'm apparently not the only one. It's pretty hard to listen to any general purpose software development podcast without hearing about Erlang, Haskell or F#. Another one came up recently that I just had to play with. It's a Lisp variant named Clojure. The reason I find
Parallel Programming with the Task Parallel Library and PLINQ in .Net 4.0 (Monday, December 14, 2009) - 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
Solrnet, a Solr Client Library for .Net (Monday, March 08, 2010) - One of the strength's of Solr is it's ease of consumption by other platforms due to its REST API and response writers which include XML, JSON, native Ruby and native Python code. If you're trying to consume a Solr service from .Net you could easily use a WebClient and parse the results with .Net's System.Xml namespace and perhaps even build an object wrapper on
