Issue: 2010 - May/June

  • May/June 2010 Editorial by Rod Paddock.
  • This is where you would normally expect our popular “Post Mortem” column: An interesting article that describes a project after it is complete and some interesting points about things that went well and things that didn’t. This month is different, however, because this is the 10-year anniversary edition of <i>CODE Magazine</i>! So while <i>CODE Magazine </i>isn’t a project that is “complete” and we certainly expect the magazine to continue on for a long time to come (bot...See More
  • Your manager just dropped into your office and said, “We have a very important, new assignment with a limited budget and tight schedule. I am assigning you to be the project manager. Good luck.”Your manager turns and leaves your office. After your heart rate subsides, you start to think about your new assignment. How shall I proceed? What tools will I use? What are my deliverables? One of the most challenging roles in the Information Technology industry is that of Projec...See More
  • Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a set of out-of-the-box features, services and tools that enhance SharePoint by streamlining the creation of solutions with deep integration of external data and services into SharePoint!SharePoint 2007 had a similar technology called BDC. But BDC was much more primitive compared to BCS.
  • What is community? A quick look at the Wikipedia defines community as “a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment” and I think that pretty much nails it. In this column, I talk about the developer community as a whole and highlight some people, organizations and events I think you should check out.
  • WCF 4 is all about productivity.
  • It is often said that ASP.NET MVC was inspired by Rails. What better way to test that assertion than by writing the Nerd Dinner ASP.NET MVC application in Rails? In this article, I’ll take you through the steps I used to get Nerd Dinner up and running in Rails. A few points to keep in mind:
  • Reviewing where we’ve been over the last decade in the world of .NET and Visual StudioAt the brink of a new release of .NET and Visual Studio, you may wonder where all of this new technology is taking us. Not only do we now have a number of new flavors of Visual Studio targeted to release on April 12, 2010, we also get to enjoy a plethora of new technologies such as Silverlight 4 and RIA Services, as well as new hardware platforms to consider, such as Windows Phone 7 Ser...See More
  • The TV commercials took me and many others by surprise. A stream-of-conscienceless-style ad that had our brains struggling to catch up with the next topic that the next person blurted out. Funny enough, the bouncing from topic to topic by the actors in the commercial seem to be a familiar metaphor to anyone that has traversed search results at one time or another. And at the end, a familiar logo appears: Microsoft, followed by a not-so-familiar one: Bing.
  • Automated build tools have been around for a long time.Many of the early tools were simple batch scripts that made calls out to other command-line tools like compilers and linkers. As the need for more and more complexity in the build scripts was realized, specialized tools like Make were introduced. These tools offered more than just sequential processing of commands. They provided some logic and decision making as well as coordination of the various parts of the build ...See More
  • Writing software is hard, particularly when the schedules keep programmers “nose to the grindstone”; every so often, it’s important to take a breather and look around the world and discover what we can find-ironically, what we find can often help us write software better.When programming and psychology mix, usually it draws rolled eyes and heavy sighs from the programmer community. But when push comes to shove, knowing a little about how our minds work can only help keep...See More