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Using Open XML SDK 2.0 to Create Office Solutions on Windows 7

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:30:02 GMT

With Open XML SDK 2.0, it becomes much easier to create Microsoft Office (2007 and 2010) based solutions with managed code than to work with VSTO (Office runtime for Visual Studio through interop) directly. The December 2009 Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the SDK, available for download here, is supported on Windows 7, Vista, XP and Windows Server 2003 and 2008. You can watch this 8-minute video to learn more about how to work with the SDK, including three handy tools for developers here.

Enterprise Library 5.0 and Unity 2.0 Roadmap

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:45:00 GMT

Now that the release of Visual Studio 2010 is just around the corner, the next thing to consider is when will the updated release of Entlib ship? Check out this blog post by Grigori Melnik where he reveals that April 14, 2010 is the magic target date.http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2010/01/20/announcing-enterprise-library-5-0-and-unity-2-0-roadmap.aspx For those of you who may not be familiar with what Enlib is - The Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges.

JSON Performance in .NET with Binary Data (testing...)

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:00:32 GMT

Binary data and text file formats (JSON, XML) don't tend get along. To be included in JSON or XML binary data has to be encode into a text friendly format, generally base64, which creates overhead both in the time spent encoding/decoding binary, and the extra size of the text encoded data in the message. In our test we'll compare serializing a message with binary data using common .NET serialization methods and compare the result.

C# 4.0 New Features, Videos, Articles and Books

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:45:00 GMT

I was collecting some learning material on C# 4.0 and stumbled across some useful videos, articles and documents available on C# 4.0. I am just listing a few of them. Check them out!

Reporting in NoSQL

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:15:02 GMT

One question that comes up a lot in conversation, however, is "dude what about reporting - you can't do that with NoSQL very well now can ya?" and the answer is "yes, correct. You can't". As with all things programming: right tool for the right job.

Query Optimization - Interesting Observation of Compute Scalar before

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:30:09 GMT

SQL SERVER - Stream Aggregate Showplan Operator - Reason of Compute Scalar before Stream Aggregate February 5, 2010 by pinaldave | Edit I keep a check on the questions received from my readers; when any question crosses my threshold, I surely try to blog about it online. Stream Aggregate is a quite commonly encountered showplan operator. I have often found it in very simple COUNT(*) operation's execution plan. If you like to read an official note on the subject, you can read the same on Book Online over here. The Stream Aggregate operator groups rows by one or more columns and then calculates one or more aggregate expressions returned by the query. Click more for further story.

Alvas.Audio 7.1 has been published.

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:30:01 GMT

Whats new (version 7.1): Writes ID3 tag version 1 from MPEG Layer3 streams. Writes INFO metadata(similar mp3 tags) from Wave streams. Checks audio signal silence...

How to Convert Hex to Decimal - A simple puzzle

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:45:02 GMT

How to Convert Hex to Decimal - A simple puzzle? Let us see if you have answer to this simple puzzle.

.NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:45:00 GMT

The ConcurrentQueue is a simple (in use, not in construction!) and yet very powerful addition to your parallel programming toolset. If you need thread-safe FIFO operations, then you can throw your locks away and start using the ConcurrentQueue today.

ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2 Released

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:00:00 GMT

After receiving feedback from our last release candidate back in December, we decided it would be prudent to have one more release candidate that incorporated the feedback. You can read the release notes for everything that changed, there's not a whole lot.

Windows Azure Drive (aka X-Drive)

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:45:39 GMT

With today's release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK version 1.1, also the Windows Azure Drive feature has been released. Announced at last year's PDC as X-Drive, which has nothing to do with a well-known German car manufacturer, this new feature enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud. This blog post will describe the necessary steps to create and/or mount a virtual hard disk on a Windows Azure role instance.

A deeper look into AutoMapper: Custom Type Resolvers

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:01:31 GMT

AutoMapper is a framework which uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. In this episode we are going to learn how to use type resolvers. Type resolvers allow you to perform custom value mapping in a very simple and elegant way with very little code

Gherkin style specification testing in .NET

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:30:06 GMT

Behavior Driven Development is something that has interested me for quite awhile. I have constantly tried to write my tests as clear and concise as possible but once I saw Cucumber for Ruby that became the new standard for what I was trying to achieve in .NET. This is where SpecFlow comes in.

.NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentStack

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:00:11 GMT

The ConcurrentStack is an excellent new tool in our parallel programming toolset which allows us to get the LIFO behavior we want, all without having to worry about locking.

Did you know about db4o - a brilliant object oriented database?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:45:10 GMT

Forget about XML for small and middle sized apps. Use simple, straight forward OO persistence (db4o it's all objects!)

Validating a variable length list, ASP.NET MVC 2-style

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:15:07 GMT

Steve Anderson follow up article on how to validate a variable elgnth list in MVC 2.

SQL SERVER - Find Statistics Update Date - Update Statistics

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:00:09 GMT

Statistics are one of the most important factors of a database as it contains information about how data is distributed in the database objects (tables, indexes etc). It is quite common to listen people talking about not optimal plan and expired statistics. Quite often I have heard the suggestion to update the statistics if query is not optimal. Please note that there are many other factors for query to not perform well; expired statistics are one of them for sure.

CodePlex adds Mercurial support

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:15:06 GMT

Microsoft's open source project hosting site announces the addition of Mercurial to its supported source control systems.

Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms)

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:30:45 GMT

For one of the first blog posts of the new year, I thought about doing something cool. And being someone working with ASP.NET MVC, I thought about a cool thing related to that: let's do something with routes! Since System.Web.Routing is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, this post will also play nice with ASP.NET Webforms. But what's the cool thing? How about. translating route values?

.NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentBag

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:45:09 GMT

Another in-depth look at a new namespace in .NET 4.0 and how it can help with multithreading.

Keeping Your ASP.NET Session Alive Using jQuery

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:00:01 GMT

The following article demonstrates how to keep your session alive when you're using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery.

Table Per Type Inheritance in Entity Framework

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:30:01 GMT

The first inheritance mapping I'm going to show is called Table Per Type or TPT. Before I start with the example lets define what is TPT.

A Simple Standalone Server for db4o as Windows Service

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:00:03 GMT

A simple db4o server (with source code) that runs as a Windows service

Binding UI Events from View to commands in ViewModel in Silverlight 4

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:15:17 GMT

In previous two posts we covered wiring up the Views and ViewModels and Blendability and showing ModalDialogs in MVVM way. Today we will touch another problem that people starting with MVVM very often fail to address properly: Handling the UI Events of the View in the ViewModel while avoiding placing any logic in code behind of the View. So our design goals for this post are: * We want to be able to wire-up UI Events to the commands in ViewModel via DataBinding in Xaml without any code behind in the View * View should not be aware of the ViewModel's type or any other details of its existence - View should just use Silverlight's DataBinding to access its ViewModel public properties (its DataContext) regardless of what is actually set to be there * We want to be able to handle any event that occurs in View (that includes not only Button clicks but also Mouse events, Drag and Drop events, Loaded events etc).

Diving a Little Deeper into AutoMapper

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Every time I use AutoMapper, I think this is such an awesome tool! I think it's hilarious to go back and read my first post in April where it states, "Now automapper is one thing I'm not sure I'll benefit from yet." and I go on to say, "I'm pretty confident that I will eventually slap myself in the face for posting this just because I'm sure it is an awesome tool that I will one day see as VERY cool, but right now...I don't". Well, I'm slapping myself :)