The cause for this post is a post by Rob Conery where he suggests removing the RDMBS from the equation, at least during development. In particular, he suggests using an OODB during development and switching to RDBMS late in the game, when going to production. The reason for doing so in order to reduce the friction of having to maintain a database during development.

New release with a new Ajax Starter-Kit. This time it's an Ajax Calendar Starter-Kit which is a minimalistic implementation of GCalendar

One of the relatively obscure features of ASP.NET view rendering is that you can render a single view using multiple view engines.

No comments appeared in the Visual Studio tooltip. On In this article, I am going to explain why it is so important to generate XML documentation file for each one of your .Net projects.

An Adobe partner have announced a new plug-in allowing .NET developers to develop Flex applications from within Visual Studio

A new improved version has been released! SVN-Monitor is a 100% free front-end to TortoiseSVN. It sits on the system-tray and helps monitoring and accessing all SVN activities of all your projects from a single place.

A few years ago a friend of mine tried to convince me to learn ASP.NET because it was much better for my career than PHP. Not because ASP.NET is better than PHP but because .NET web development is a profession while PHP is only a skill.

Previously, when covering some of the additions to the .NET 4.0 Framework such as optional and named parameters, some of the other additions have caught my eye from the perspective of functional programming. Unlike .NET 3.5, this release is not as targeted towards functional programming as it is more towards dynamic programming and COM interoperability. But, there are a few items to note that we can soon take advantage of, including the Tuple type and the Zip operator function among other items.

Some months ago I came across an anomaly in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 when handling exceptions in a .NET project and it threw me through a loop. I'm a fan of the ANTLR parser generator and so I was working on a project that parses some user input text. As a feature, if the parser doesn't like the input, I expect that it will throw an exception which I would catch from my code. This worked in all but one particular test case. If I provided input for which the lexer has no rules for, such as giving it a string with a semicolon when there's no rules recognizing that character, it throws a NoViableAltException to let you know it didn't know what to do with that character.

A developer centric overview of the core Azure Cloud Computing Platform from Microsoft.

One of the great things about being a programmer is that when you need software that you don’t have, you can usually write a small utility application to do what you need without having to purchase the software.

Gzip and Deflate are two popular HTTP compression methods. I ran a test in C# to figure out which one is faster and by how much. Read this article to see which won the speed test and how to implement Gzip and Deflate HTTP compression in your website.

For those who aren't familiar with Duck Typing, here is the definition from Wikipedia In computer programming, duck typing is a style of dynamic typing in which an object's current set of methods and properties determines the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class. The name of the concept refers to the duck test, attributed to James Whitcomb Riley (see History below), which may be phrased as follows: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck.

Ryan plugs his Gravatar library into MVC in order to create a HTML view helper for building gravatar images.

Quake online!!! with Silverlight !!! WOW!!!!!

The title of my workshop was "Functional Programming - Is It A Game Changer", and instead, I think the talk is better titled "Approaching Functional Programming". In this talk, I not only talked about the basics of functional programming, but how to mix and match the object oriented and imperative styles as well.

If you have the algorithms with conditional statements in the client code it will be messy. The Strategy pattern moves an algorithm from the client code to a separate class.

Checklist for before relaunching a bug-free, optimized website.

I'm pleased to announce that S#arp Architecture 0.9 has been released at http://code.google.com/p/sharp-architecture/downloads/list. Along with completely updated documentation (in /docs) and migration guidance (in /VersionHistory.txt), this release has a number of improvements to the SharpArch libraries.

a quick look at building an application using the new ASP.Net MVC Beta, part one will handle the database

While reviewing my latest post’s outbound click-through stats, I noticed that most of you found Rik Lomas’ quickSearch more interesting than the rest. In light of that interest, I’ve decided to show you an example of how you might implement its functionality in conjunction with ASP.NET.

Today I’ll share with you just a warm up – one of the first things I have implemented here at Avangate: Employing the Google Analytics code to track 404 error pages

Many a web application can be enhanced with a decent graph to show data. Unfortunately out of the programming languages / frameworks that we have available to us, none seem to be very forthcoming with decent graph components, and it is left up to third party solutions to provide the necessary.

You may have already read Justin Van Patten's post about the upcoming breaking changes to the String class for .NET 4.0. This change will affect the behavior of the String.StartsWith, String.EndsWith, String.IndexOf and String.LastIndexOf methods by changing them to perform an ordinal (byte-for-byte) comparison by default instead of a culture-sensitive comparison using CultureInfo.CurrentCulture. In addition, the default overloads of String.ToUpper, String.ToLower, Char.ToUpper and Char.ToLower will be changed to use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture instead of CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.

Even if you’re still stuck using a non-dynamic language (Java, C#, etc), you can steal a trick or two from the other side. Command chaining is an easy practice that can simplify your code.