Issue: 2013 - September/October

  • Sept/Oct 2013 Editorial by Rod Paddock
  • The future at Microsoft is cloudy, with an increasingly bleak chance of on-premises. It’s interesting to see how Microsoft is aggressively transitioning into a device and services company, and that on-premises applications are getting step-child treatment lately. Almost all of the innovation lately happens on or for the cloud, and if we are lucky, we get morsels of treats in our on-premises doggie bag. I’m not complaining, merely observing. A move to the cloud makes a lot of sense.
  • I have a client that has a few Windows Services and some EXEs that run on a computer to perform various business functions. Every once in a while, the processes fail and need to be restarted. I helped the client write a Windows Service to monitor their running processes and ensure that they are up and running and to notify them and to attempt to restart those processes. As part of this process, I had to write a class to get a list of all of the processes running on the c...See More
  • If you have been following this series of CODE Framework articles, you are already aware that CODE Framework provides the ability to use, create, and customize awesome-looking WPF application themes that also make apps maintainable and easy to build. But not everyone wants to create brand new Themes or customize existing ones. Instead, why not just use one of the great themes that ship in the box?
  • When I started my company Attachments.me three years ago, NoSQL was a hot topic. Advocates preached impressive benefits:
  • Database developers who learn Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) know that they face a number of learning curves. In prior Baker’s Dozen articles, I’ve covered many of the steps for creating both SSAS OLAP and SSAS Tabular databases. In this article, I’m going to cover another topic: How to add or change data in analytic databases.
  • The Module Pattern is not a new topic or unique to JavaScript. Yet for many that are new to JavaScript, the Module Pattern is a topic that eludes. Whether you are an experienced JavaScript developer or are just getting acquainted with the language, knowing what the Module Pattern is and how to implement it, it is absolutely essential if you hope to attain success with JavaScript. In this article, I will briefly cover what the Module Pattern is and how you can immediately apply the pattern.
  • This article introduces a few of the coolest features in RavenDB 2.5, but before I get to the stuff that will make you drool, there is a slight possibility that you aren't familiar with RavenDB. The next section fixes that, and then I will go into what is new and cool.
  • Increasingly, users have come to expect that applications they use continue to respond while the application processes information in the background. To achieve the best responsiveness, you need to build applications to be as asynchronous as possible. In the past, creating asynchronous operations consisted of passing callback delegates or lambda expressions to indicate what action to take when an action completes. These can lead to an unmanageable mess of spaghetti code.
  • Since the release of .NET 1.0 more than ten years ago, the classes governing identity have remained unchanged. That’s a good thing, because identity and security is at the core of most applications, so you don’t want that to change very often. However, with the release of .NET 4.5, the identity model has changed significantly.
  • 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.