Articles filed in category '.NET 4.0'

  • Paul begins a new series of articles on how to create a WPF business application. This first one teaches how to use a message broker to eliminate strong coupling between classes, how to display status and information to the user while resources are loading, and how to load user controls onto a single window while aggregating controls and building a large screen.
  • In the third installment of his WPF series, Paul shows you how to get feedback using an Entity Framework entity class. He also shows you how to start expanding user activities, like adding, editing, or deleting screens.
  • In part 1 of this article, you learned how to create a Windows 8 look and feel for your WPF applications. You were shown a high-level overview of the various components that made up the shell for navigating. In part 2 of this article you will learn to create a WPF Button user control, a Message Box you can style, and a simple Message Broker System. All of these components are used to create the “Windows 8 Style” WPF shell you learned about in part 1.
  • You can avoid all that pesky overhead when dealing with multiple platforms by using Microsoft’s library of APIs, Xamarin.Forms. Wei-Meng shows you how to efficiently map to the various platforms’ respective native UI elements at run time.
  • You can access just about any data with type providers, whether in XML, JSON, or APIs. Rachel shows us how, plus a nifty new Swagger type provider.
  • The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open REST-ful protocol for exposing and consuming data on the web. Also known as Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services, now officially called WCF Data Services in the .NET Framework. There are also SDKs available for other platforms like JavaScript and PHP. Visit the OData site at www.odata.org.
  • By providing the history of asynchronous and await patterns, Bill examines the benefits of using these techniques in developing new apps and when it comes to the maintenance or revision of legacy code.
  • Rick follows up on his server-side Angular back end for ASP.NET Core with this interesting look at the matching front end.
  • While the development community has accepted the inevitable future of Line-of-Business RIAs and indispensable role of Silverlight in their creation, many of them have started looking for ways to use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services in Silverlight applications. It is logical: Reporting Services is reasonably capable and the most-used reporting engine on the market. Millions of developers are Reporting Services professionals and of course they would like to continue...See More
  • If you’re lucky enough to be involved in building a new enterprise system, you’ll want to check this out. Rachel takes a look at how the company where she works made some interesting—and forward-looking—decisions, and she shows us the benefits of microservices while she’s at it.
  • In a prior installment of this series of articles about CODE Framework (“CODE Framework: Writing MVVM/MVC WPF Applications”, Jan/Feb 2012), I discussed how to use the WPF features of CODE Framework to create rich client applications in a highly productive and structured fashion reminiscent of creating ASP.NET MVC applications, although with WPF MVVM concepts applied. In this article, I will dive deeper into the subject and discuss the unique benefits of the CODE Framewor...See More
  • The CODE Framework provides a set of tools for developing n-tier, service-oriented applications. In addition, there is a set of recommended patterns and practices that provide guidance in enabling developers to achieve Rapid Application Development, Contract-First implementation, and a system that allows you to change a contract without breaking an implementation. However, one question which has been repeatedly asked throughout our trainings and seminars is, “How do I Un...See More
  • In the last issue of CODE Magazine, we took a look at CODE Framework’s WPF features. This time, we are going to look at a completely different area of the framework: Creating business logic and middle tiers as SOA services. SOA is the cornerstone of many modern applications, creating systems that are more maintainable, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of scenarios, ranging from Windows to Web and Mobile scenarios using a wide variety of technologies, and outperfor...See More
  • With the advancement in the Silverlight technology starting with the 1.0 release to 2.0, 3.0, and lately 4.0, Silverlight is loudly saying WOW “Watch Out World.” Can you guess which world I am talking about here? It is the RIAs world! Really WOW!
  • Those helpful buttons for minimize, maximize, and close functions need to be added to your WPF pages if you don’t want to crowd your user’s screen. Paul shows you how.
  • Microsoft’s Azure platform has finally been released into production. This new entry into the cloud computing market provides .NET developers with a scalable, robust platform for developing applications.After over a year in CTP, Azure is finally ready for prime time. At PDC 2009, Microsoft announced the release of new components, such as the management API, that make Azure worth considering for use in production environments. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use ...See More
  • Does the idea of using an app that’s never been tested give you the willies? It should, and Paul talks about finding the sticking points so you can be confident that your code works as intended before someone fires it up.
  • Vassili extends his own custom scripting language for mobile development and makes creating and placing widgets fast and easy.
  • Since cloud computing came to town, you can’t count on your system’s software and appliances all being in the same time zone. Mike addresses some thorny issues and helps you keep your data up to date.
  • Many developers find that keeping up with new technologies can be challenging and a drain to limited resources. Sometimes a review of basic .NET and C# skills is useful. This review of extension methods addresses the basic concept and implementation. Thousands of implementations are most certainly found in the industry, but in this article I want to address a few popular and useful ones.
  • Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to quickly create data-centric business applications for the desktop and the cloud.LightSwitch is an extensible development environment and application framework that simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. LightSwitch is perfect for small business or departmental productivity ap...See More
  • Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. Kathleen shows you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.Microsoft included its T4 generation language in the box in Visual Studio 2008 and added important new features in Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 makes generation easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates.Code generation lets you automatically create signific...See More
  • You might have heard some things about NoSQL; how Google and Facebook are using non-relational databases to handle their load. And in most cases, this is where it stopped. NoSQL came about because scaling relational databases is somewhere between extremely hard to impossible.
  • Visual Studio LightSwitch applications consist of three tiers: presentation, logic and data. This article discusses the logic tier and its save pipeline. The save pipeline is where developers write business logic that runs as changes are processed on the logic tier and saved to the data storage tier. The save pipeline is automatically generated with every LightSwitch application. Understanding the processing done in the save pipeline is not required to successfully build...See More
  • New releases ASP.NET Core and .NET Core have come up with some interesting high-level architecture that you’ll want to read about. You’ll definitely want to play with these tools after Rick shows you some cool new tricks.
  • Have you ever thought that the language you were coding in lacked some important tools? Vassili shows you how to write your own language without building a compiler.
  • Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch uses a model-centric architecture for defining, building, and executing a 3-tier LightSwitch application.
  • IronPython is easy to learn yet surprisingly powerful language for .NET development. In this article, I’ll introduce you to IronPython and demonstrate it differs from C# and Visual Basic while still allowing you to leverage your existing .NET knowledge.
  • In 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new vision called “Software + Services” that would fundamentally change the way that both Microsoft and their customers build software and have a gradual, yet marked ripple effect throughout the software giant’s entire strategy.
  • The Razor syntax is much more than just a clean way to write ASP.NET MVC Views and WebMatrix web pages. In fact, with a working knowledge of the Razor API, you can leverage Razor templates in any application. The Razor API exposes a powerful library for parsing, compiling, and executing templates created using the Razor syntax.
  • It’s probably one of the most interesting moments to do a post mortem for a Silverlight project. The entire Microsoft ecosystem is boiling around the Silverlight OR HTML 5 debate fueled by the recent PDC and some statements from Microsoft officials. The interesting part about it is that it is a false debate, and like most false debates it will probably lead to nowhere. The simple truth is that Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight has not changed a bit, and Silverlight i...See More
  • I have a client that has a few Windows Services and some EXEs that run on a computer to perform various business functions. Every once in a while, the processes fail and need to be restarted. I helped the client write a Windows Service to monitor their running processes and ensure that they are up and running and to notify them and to attempt to restart those processes. As part of this process, I had to write a class to get a list of all of the processes running on the c...See More
  • Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.
  • Sahil continues his interesting series by writing a fronted to the Mobile app he wrote the backend for in the November/December 2014 issue.
  • Walt continues his series of articles on Xamarin, this time, exploring the nature of pages. You’ll learn what a page is, how to navigate among them, how to create sub-pages, and strategies for loading data onto pages.
  • WCF 4 is all about productivity.
  • July/August2010 Post Mortem by Markus Egger
  • Deborah covers many of the different ways you can use lambda expressions to work with your lists and make your code easier to read and write.Lambdas provide shortcuts for sorting, filtering, finding and working with information in lists, making your code easier to read and write.
  • Rick Garibay takes you on a tour of cloud-based messaging services including Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Windows Azure.
  • Microsoft’s IronRuby project brings a powerful and fun dynamic language to the Windows platform. In this article, I’ll examine the history of Ruby and the IronRuby project at Microsoft. I’ll talk about why a .NET programmer may want to learn and use Ruby, and cover the core syntax of the language to get you started learning it
  • Lambda expressions have been around for a while, but they seem poorly understood and generally underused. You can juice up your code with these dynamic types from .NET, according to John. Find out how!
  • If you want to re-use some of the concepts John introduced in the last two issues, you’ll want to learn all about Dynamic Lambda Expressions work in .NET.
  • John explores the flexibility of dynamic queries and multiple data types within the same dictionary. You’ll be amazed at how simple it really is!
  • If you are a .NET software developer, you have heard of F#. You may have read an article, seen a talk at a user group, or otherwise heard the buzz. However, if those means of reaching you have failed, at the very least, you have noticed it conspicuously appear in the list of languages you can base a solution on in Visual Studio 2010. If you write code on the .NET Framework, you would have to be living under a rock to have not heard of F#.
  • Since the beginning of .NET, developers have been able to take advantage of multithreading when developing applications. In fact we’ve been given more than one programming model to accommodate just about any requirement that might come across. There’s the Thread class, the Thread Pool, the Async Pattern, and the Background Worker. Well, as if that isn’t enough, we now have a couple of more patterns that bring with them another genre - parallel programming.
  • rewarding experience of writing and speaking is taking a seemingly complex topic and making it more understandable and accessible. In this article, I’ll show how to create and use OLAP databases and cubes using SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 (SSAS 2008). The benefits of OLAP are significant, even monumental - but like most technologies, reaping the benefits means considerable research and effort into leveraging the tools. In the case of OLAP databases, developers nee...See More
  • In this article you will learn how to isolate yourself from change by taking advantage of the Provider Model.Designing your applications using the Provider Model will allow you to swap components out at runtime, thus allowing you to upgrade them easily.
  • The new view engine for ASP.NET MVC and WebMatrix combines simplicity and functionality to facilitate clean view development. In this article, I’ll dive into the Razor View Engine, the new default view engine for the ASP.NET MVC framework and WebMatrix products. Razor’s main goal is to simplify view development and to improve developer productivity while providing a clean view infrastructure.
  • Markus Egger discusses the current State of WPF and Silverlight and the overall importance and acceptance of these technologies.
  • Sometimes your .NET applications need to interact with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate users, get a list of users, retrieve groups, or determine which users are within which AD groups. There are a few different approaches you can use to retrieve information from your AD database within your domain.
  • You need PowerShell operators if you’re writing a script or module, and there are quite a variety to choose from. Dan takes us on a tour of some of the ones you’ll use the most.
  • Keeping up with Visual Studio’s frequent and often simultaneous releases from multiple sources can be nearly impossible. In another of his edifying series, John Petersen gives us the scoop.
  • You’re going to have to hold onto your hat! Jeffrey looks at what’s new in VS 2015, and it’s all good.
  • Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET - version 4.0 - which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration setti...See More
  • If you’d like a neat summary of the many interesting and useful changes in CODE Magazine’s free development framework, you’ve come to the right place. Markus talks about themes, input validation, security, and binding, Web API service hosting, calling REST services, and interacting with the community and GitHub.
  • If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.
  • Visual C# version 4.0 offers new features that make it easier for you to work in dynamic programming scenarios.Besides dynamic programming, you have support for optional and named parameters, better COM interop support, and contra-variance and covariance. This article will show you how each of these features work and provide suggestions of how they can be applied to help you be more productive.
  • It’s so new that the dust is still settling, and VS2017 was worth the wait. Markus explores the ins and outs of his favorite new features.
  • Functional programming is all the rage and Microsoft's foray into the functional world is called F#. Rachel introduces you to this first-class functional language with the ability to harness the rich .NET ecosystem.
  • Michiel van Otegem explains Software-as-a-Service by comparing various online products and shows you how to store information about users whether you use Active Directory or Windows Azure Active Directory in the cloud.
  • In Part 1 of this article you learned how to work with orientation changes on the Windows Phone and how to create horizontally scrolling pages using Panorama and Pivot pages. In Part 2 you’ll see how to interact with some of the built-in applications on the phone through the use of the Launcher and Chooser applications.
  • ListBoxes suck. Except that statement is not true anymore. Not in WPF and Silverlight anyway, where ListBoxes have evolved from simplistic controls to true workhorse objects. ListBoxes have been around since the beginning of Windows (and other GUIs) and have served a pervasive yet simple purpose, which can be summed up as “show me a list of labels in a list with a scroll bar.” A premise that has its uses but is not sophisticated enough for advanced data presentation, ...See More
  • Visual Studio Code is the hot new thing these days. Vassili tells you how to take advantage of some of its features, including CSCS, Rich Language Services, REPL language interpretation, and debugging.
  • In the second article of the series, Markus talks about keeping your code readable and maintainable by controlling how often and where you reuse objects.