Issue: 2010 - March/April

  • Mar/April 2010 Editoral by Rod Paddock
  • Every developer needs to test their code, or have it tested by someone.I don’t know about you, but I am horrible at testing my own code. Does this mean that I do not need to test my code? Heck, no! It is always best if you do not rely on your end user to test your code. This can end up with a very frustrated user, and your user can lose faith in your ability to get their project done.
  • SharePoint 2007 was a developer platform! But it took a developer with the patience of Job and the intelligence of MIT to deal with the bad development tools that we used to work with in SharePoint 2007. The picture in SharePoint 2010 is a lot better!
  • 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 series, I’ll talk about the developer community as a whole and highlight some people, organizations and events I think you should check out.
  • Getting friendly with HTML in ASP.NET MVC just got a whole lot easier.In this article, I’ll delve into the Spark View Engine, an alternate view engine for the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Spark’s main goal is to allow HTML to dominate the flow of view development while allowing code to fit in seamlessly.
  • 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
  • The richest set of cloud computing services comes from a little e-commerce company known as Amazon.com. Developers can access the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform using numerous tools including the .NET platform.Amazon.com is a major player in the cloud computing space and has numerous services available to developers. In late 2009, Amazon released the AWS SDK for .NET. This article will demonstrate using the AWS SDK to create a custom backup service using the Amazon S...See More
  • How many times have you found yourself in need of knowing what the next or previous business date is?What about the dates when a particular quarter begins and ends? Have you had to handle the thorny issue of daylight savings time (DST); when does DST begin and end for this or another year in the US, UK or some other region? And finally, once you have determined you have a need to calculate these various date values, where do you host that logic? This article answers those questions.
  • Microsoft released Entity Framework, an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool, in 2008.Entity Framework gives developers the ability to be abstracted from the underlying relational database management system and allows them to talk to a database using familiar LINQ-based syntax.
  • Hot on the heels of the groundbreaking release of ASP.NET MVC CTP 1 in December of 2007, an open source project called MvcContrib came to life.MvcContrib has enjoyed tens of thousands of downloads since it started in December of 2007. In this article, I will explain MvcContrib; it’s major components, how to use it, and how to get involved in its continued development.
  • Consider this hypothetical: You need to track different ways it is permissible to contact a customer.Or perhaps there are multiple attributes you wish to attach to an entity. Further, perhaps you want to define new attributes that can vary from entity to entity. From a database perspective, this can present a thorny problem. Fortunately, indexers in C# provide an elegant solution to the problem. In this article, I will show you how to use indexers to expand an organizati...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.Life as a programmer is difficult enough, but what happens when even the simplest conversation with other programmers on your team (much less the customers) goes awry?