Issue: 2008 - November/December

Rod Paddock's Nov/Dec 2008 Editorial

Nov/Dec 2008 MVP Corner by Juilia Lerman

As I am flying back home over the Atlantic, I can’t help but think how much better SharePoint has become after the introduction of .NET 3.5. I have repeatedly insisted that one of the reasons behind SharePoint 2007’s huge success is the application of ASP.NET 2.0 concepts to SharePoint.In this article, I am going to talk about the specific improvements .NET 3.5 has brought to the SharePoint 2007 platform, and how that has made my development life so much better. I will t...alk of three exemplary examples, and in subsequent articles, I will splice each one of these topics in further depth.See More

When you build complex UI applications, it is all too easy to end up with a messy, tightly coupled, interwoven mess that is difficult to develop and maintain; and impossible to test.Too avoid that, you need to employ good design patterns in your UI layer that help you keep things loosely-coupled and testable. Composite Application Guidance for WPF is a set of libraries, documentation, and sample code from Microsoft patterns & practices that helps you to build clean, main...tainable applications. In this article, I’ll show you what this set of guidance provides and how to use it to build your WPF applications.See More

Automate high-friction, unpredictable tasks in your environment to regain sanity and achieve a rapid, sustainable pace.Every environment has them: The dreaded manual tasks that drain productivity from the team and adds instability to the processes. We usually only dedicate half our brain power and never enough time to deal with them, which only compounds the problem. What if you could easily automate out the most painful tasks and gain a huge boost in productivity and speed of delivery?

CSLA .NET for Silverlight is a version of CSLA .NET framework specifically written to support development of Silverlight applications.Microsoft's Silverlight is a cross-browser plug-in that uses XAML and a subset of .NET to enable rich client applications across platforms.

In fact, in most cases, business rules are the very reason for the existence of most software today. As application architectures have become more and more sophisticated, few can disagree with the merits of separating the presentation layer from the business layer or the data layer from the business layer. Yet many applications today are still built with process logic and business rules interwoven within the same business/application layer, which can lead to applications... that are brittle, hard to maintain, and resistant to change. In this article, I will explain how to decouple the business rules within your application in a manner that yields high organizational visibility and accountability; and promotes rules as a unit of reuse to help you build applications that are ready for change.See More

All applications are dependent on data in some form and most developers find themselves writing reams of data access code.Microsoft has been building data binding frameworks for years. Each one promises to solve our data binding woes forever. We're still waiting for the perfect one. Is WPF data binding the one we've been waiting for?

Nov/Dec 08 .NET Rocks by Carl Franklin

Nov/Dec 08 Doc Detective column