Issue: 2009 - July/August

Rod Paddock July/August 2009 Editorial

Markus Egger/Tower 48 Advertorial

Why is it that over time, any machine you buy just seems to get slower and slower?Why is it that over time, any machine you buy just seems to get slower and slower?

One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production.All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another problem of being an on-demand consultant is that the clock starts ticking even before I've understood the problem desc...ription.One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production. All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet anotherSee More

WPF is finally gaining momentum, and so is Silverlight.Users are starting to take a serious look at Silverlight as an option for rich applications; some of them even have scenarios where targeting both platforms make sense. The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight Applications has received improvements that help developers building either WPF, Silverlight, or both types of composite applications.

Today, more and more websites need to identify who their users are. However, in most cases this involves providing authentication, which requires storing the users handle and password. An alternative to this is to allow a third party to authenticate the user and provide your website with the identity. This absolves you from needless worries of securing the authentication information. An emerging standard for identification is OpenID (http://www.openid.net). OpenID is a s...hared identity service, allowing users to log into many Internet sites using a single digital identity. This article will explore how to extend the ASP.NET provider model to accept a user’s OpenID.See More

As a developer, it is no surprise to encounter unexpected behavior when working with a new technology.Microsoft added the Entity Framework (EF) to ADO.NET with the .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 released in 2008 enabling developers to incorporate a data model directly in their application and interact with their data through the model rather than working directly against the database. For background on EF, see my previous article, “Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework” in the N...ov/Dec 2007 issue of CODE Magazine.See More

Change is always a central issue for software development.In this regard Microsoft AJAX Web application is never an exception. You may find your application packed with a plethora of UpdatePanels and event handlers. Besides, you may be confused that ASP.NET AJAX offers more than one technique to do one thing but you cannot use them consistently. As a result, it becomes hard to make changes in your application.

The INotifyPropertyChanged interface, while easy to implement, is hard to consume.Registering for notification events requires extra bookkeeping code that obfuscates business logic. Update Controls is an open source library that replaces event-based data binding with automatic discovery and updating. Powerful yet difficult patterns become simple.

It’s becoming less and less common to show raw data directly to the user.At the very least, portions of your data may require reformatting to make it more readable for your users. But applying a simple format, say showing a numeric value as a percentage, only goes so far. WPF offers an impressive data transformation tool called Data Templates that can radically change the visualization applied to business data.

This article continues from the May/June 2009 issue of CODE Magazine (Quick ID 0906081) which covered why you want to use NHibernate, techniques for configuring NHibernate, how to map your objects to your data entities, and how to load basic objects.

RIA Services is a new Microsoft framework for developing n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications. RIA Services make it easier to build Silverlight applications that communicate with a server, which is the focus of this article. As a developer, RIA Services provides automatic code generation for common scenarios where you need to perform CRUD operations on data and have a consistent model to validate data across tiers. The following sections explain how to get started ...with RIA Services, specify a data source and a UI, and automatically generate code for CRUD operations. Let me show you the big picture of RIA Services from an architectural perspective first.See More

July/August 09 Doc Detective Column

Writing software is hard, particularly when the tools you use force you to think at too low a level; it’s time to start thinking about changing the way you write code… by thinking about the industry around us and how that affects your environment.Every so often an event comes along in the industry that represents a potential “sea change” to how the industry operates. Sometimes these are technical changes, either by releasing a new technology or an important ground-breaki...ng change to an existing one. Sometimes they’re economic, driven by market forces outside of our direct control. And sometimes, they’re financial, such as when two industry giants come together.See More

Markus Egger discusses the current State of WPF and Silverlight and the overall importance and acceptance of these technologies.