Issue: 2012 - July/August

Rod Paddock July/August 2012 Editorial

When a team at Microsoft first conceived of SharePoint, the product team decided that the content database was the best place to store file uploads in SharePoint. Before you pull out daggers, consider that there were many advantages to this choice. You can never have a virus corrupting the server in an upload that goes into the database. No filename issues. Transaction support. Easy backups, etc. Also, believe it or not, for a certain file size (smaller the better), data...bases can actually offer better performance than traditional file systems for storage. In addition, the product team decided to rely heavily on GUIDs and clustered indexes inside the content database - again, a choice with positives and negatives. See More

You know you should be moving code out from behind your forms, windows and web pages and into stand-alone classes. Everyone preaches that this is what to do, everyone shows you examples of ViewModel classes, but no one really shows you a real-world example of how to get rid of the code behind.

The big news about Windows 8 is its new mode based on the Metro design language and UI paradigm. Metro apps are based on the new WinRT (Windows Runtime) and can be built in two distinct ways. One utilizes HTML5 and JavaScript, while the other uses XAML for the user interface definition and C#, Visual Basic, or native C++ as the language behind the scenes. Not surprisingly, the later has often been compared to other XAML-based setups, in particular Silverlight, but also W...PF. After all, “XAML is XAML,” the reasoning goes, so it should not be difficult to move both WPF/Silverlight skills as well as actual applications into the new world of WinRT. But is that really so?See More

Ten years after the release of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is stirring the pot again with a new development platform that set’s to focus your talents on what everyone is betting is the next big thing, mobile devices; specifically in this case, tablets. The Windows Runtime, or WinRT, is the foundation for the development of applications designed to target Windows 8-driven touch-enabled devices, but what does that mean for .NET developers and their existing skill sets?

In the first installment of this series, I explored a few of the new features in ASP.NET MVC 4, including the new default project templates, mobile templates, and display modes. Since that article, ASP.NET MVC 4 has been released to beta. For brevity’s sake, when I refer to MVC the design pattern, I’m referring to the ASP.NET implementation of the pattern. In this installment, I’m going to focus on one of MVC’s most useful features: integrated JavaScript and CSS bundling and minification.

As software development becomes complicated, writing unit tests provides a protection against constant changes and modifications. Traditionally, unit tests were written by testing each piece of the application layer in isolation. With the advent of behavior-driven development, now our unit tests can be composed into user defined stories. Each story represents a single feature of the application which can be tested from end to end. This method makes sure that the unit tes...t only passes when the story is completely done. In this article I’ll show you how to use SpecFlow and WatiN to write BDD-style tests to implement user stories. See More

Software developers live and breathe debugging. It’s an essential and integral part of our day-to-day job. Whenever we are confronted with any bug in code, our typical first question is, “How can I reproduce this issue?” Any problems that cannot be reproduced are generally considered tricky to resolve. In order to really understand the challenges with debugging hard to reproduce issues, let’s walk through a few scenarios here.

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.

There’s an old programmer adage: “First you make it work, then you make it work fast.” Well, when writing T-SQL queries, you can do both, if you have some knowledge about how the SQL Server optimizer works. This will be a two-part article. In part one, I’ll start with fairly basic optimization tips and techniques for writing SQL queries. In part two, I’ll cover more advanced techniques.

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.