Richard's blog

Connecting to Azure Table Storage

.Net Smoothie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:52:22 GMT

After you finally manage to get Table Storage working (see nice tutorial here) you’ll try to deploy it to your staging environment. That means you need to change the configuration. There are three settings to use: AccountName, AccountSharedKey and...(read more)

Learning Windows Azure

.Net Smoothie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:01:40 GMT

I started to learn how to use the Azure Cloud Service from Microsoft this week. Currently it’s still in Tech Preview stage. Unfortunately you can tell that from the SDK documentation. Here’s some useful links to get you going: Screencasts...(read more)

Hosting an Automated Build Server

.Net Smoothie — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:22:01 GMT

I’m the build server guy at my company. I’ve been using an automated integration service for about 3 years, and I love it. It really helps keep me disciplined. Before my build server was running, we had a constant problem with missing files...(read more)

A Quick WebService for My Students

.Net Smoothie — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:20:05 GMT

For my students on the Trivadis .Net 2.0 course this week, I’ve made a quick web-service for you in Visual Basic. For everyone else, I’ll let you use it too. I might not keep it online for long though, and there are no guarantees to...(read more)

C# Acrobatics : Lambdas and Expression Methods as a replacement for NVelocity

.Net Smoothie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:09:06 GMT

I’ve been very quiet recently. (I’m trying to not be so loud, Scott. ) You see, I’ve been writing a lot of ASP.Net code for a site I’m working on. And, to be honest, I’ve been having a lot of trouble. The source code for...(read more)

The Value of Being Free to See the Source

.Net Smoothie — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:09:54 GMT

Since the source code to ASP.Net was made available, I’ve been using it extensively. Here’s a great example of why it’s so valuable. I’ve been trying to integrate the Enterprise Library 3.1 Exception Handling Block into my application...(read more)

Easy Data-loading with LINQ-to-SQL and LINQ-to-XML

.Net Smoothie — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:53:48 GMT

.Net 3.5 had some nice tricks in it. LINQ-to-XML was one of them. With the new "X"-types, you can make working with XML really easy. VB.Net 9 takes it one step further, and lets you write XML in your code without strings. "Hey Rich, that’s...(read more)

Silverlight 2 Poster Available

.Net Smoothie — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:52:43 GMT

You’re not a real Silverlight developer until you have the poster stuck up on your wall. Apparently these were hot at Mix. Thanks to Brad Abrams for posting it....(read more)

Design Guidelines for LINQ

.Net Smoothie — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:40:24 GMT

Have you wondered if and when you should use the new LINQ features in .Net 3.5? Like, where should I put a new extension method? Should I use Func<T> or a custom delegate? How do I best implement a mix-in (extension methods on an interface)? Well...(read more)

Read Word Documents in a Web Browser

.Net Smoothie — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:33:09 GMT

I love this! Not because of the features, but because of the way it works. Tim Sneath just blogged about TextGlow - an online Word docx file reader. The docx format is XML, and Silverlight 2 apps can use LINQ-to-XML to parse it and format it for display...(read more)

Mix 08 WPF Scheduling Application

.Net Smoothie — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:41:59 GMT

Mix 08 seems to be much more mature than ever before. In previous years there were a lot of ideas being spoken about; this year there are much more implementations of those ideas available to look at. It seems like a lot of people have been working on...(read more)

Silverlight for Nokia Phones

.Net Smoothie — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:45:45 GMT

BBC News has just released an article referring to a deal made between Microsoft and Nokia to put Silverlight on mobile phones. Yet another reason to get polishing those WPF skills....(read more)

Mix 08 Online Presentations

.Net Smoothie — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:06:54 GMT

My favorite conference is about to start: MIX 08. It’s a great conference for Microsoft developers with an interest in the web. Last year they had some great talks about user experience and architecture. There’s always something interesting...(read more)

ExtensionMethod.net - An Extension Methods Database

.Net Smoothie — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:32:03 GMT

While surfing around tonight, I came across ExtensionMethod.net, a database of useful Extension Methods for C# 3.0 and VB 9. I thought it might be useful, so I added a few of my own extension methods. IComparable<T>.LessThan int.Times int.To There...(read more)

LINQ or DIE

.Net Smoothie — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:51:59 GMT

I just read a fantastic quote about LINQ from the book Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 by Joseph C. Rattz, Jr.: I prefer to think of LINQ as a data iteration engine, but perhaps Microsoft didn’t want a technology named DIE. I think...(read more)