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Chris Tavares and I were chatting yesterday morning about an idea Chris had: building a simple, reusable Http Module that gives folks DI scoped to the Application, Session, and Request. Yesterday afternoon, during the p&p Dev team's weekly "Code Kata" we threw together a spike/proof of concept in a couple of hours. "Code Kata" is a three hour block of time that the p&p Dev team uses for a number of things: cross-project pollination of ideas, things that work, things that don't work across project teams investigating new and emerging technologies that p&p may work with in the future investigating new and emerging platforms to determine if p&p may want to provide guidance in the future play with new...

I got an email last night from Eduardo. Eduardo "Love's VB.NET", but is concerned about his long term career prospects because he keeps hearing about C#. The Pie Chart from the Telerik Survey suggests that C# has surpassed VB.NET as the .NET language of choice. For the record, I don't think this accurately reflects the division. I would guess that it's more like 55% VB.NET and 45% C#. People ask me all the time why I choose VB.NET instead of C# for my videos . The truthful answer is, I don't. I use VB because ScottGu asked me to use VB.NET. At first, I was a bit queased out :) - I first started programming in "C" in 1978 and C++ in abut 1988-1989. So languages of "C" flavor like Java and C# are just...

This is the sixth post in a series. The other post include: Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Ummmm...Oooops. Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Actually Adding Unity If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . For those who have been following along, you all know I am making this up as I go. So, I am asking that you be patient with me as we figure this out together. This...

This is the fifth post in a series. The other post include: Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Ummmm...Oooops. If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . First off, I have moved this little side project to source control, so I can avoid the re-work I had to do before I could write this part of the series. Note to self : NEVER work without a safety net. That means both unit tests and source control...

Jeff asked the question " Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs? " this week. There are number of things in his post I disagree with. First, " dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written software " is just a specious statement as it's the OS's job to protect you, it shouldn't matter how many cores there are. Second, " In my opinion, quad-core CPUs are still a waste of electricity unless you're putting them in a server" is also silly. Considering that modern CPUs slow down when not being used, and use minimal electricity when compared to your desk lamp and monitors, I can't see not buying the best (and most) processors) that I can afford. The same goes with memory. Buy as much as you can...

This is the third post in a series. The other post include Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . In the last installment I wanted to remove the following from the ICompositionContainer: static methods Builder Locator Containers Services We completed the first four. In this installment, we will remove the Services collection, replacing it with using RegisterInstance and Resolve. After that, we will compare our ICompositionContainer...

This is the second post in a series. The initial post is Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . If you want background, go read the first post. Let's get started with some coding. First, I backed up my WCSF and WCSF-AppBlock code. Then, I opened up Visual Studio 2008, opened the Composite Web Application Block solution (with VSTS Tests), compiled, and ran all the tests. All Green. Now for the tough part, thinking about what we want to do. Basically, we need to be able to replace the CompositionContainer with an IUnityContainer, and remove a lot of dead code. How can we do this? We need to have a simple interface that would work as a facade on both containers (and any others). So, let's create an interface for...

A few weeks ago, I decided I needed to play with the Unity Dependency Injection container . I wanted to see how Chris and the rest of the team had designed it and see how usable the container was. I had seen requests on the Web Client Software Factory project's CodePlex site asking for a Unity version of WCSF. Put the two together, and I have a side project, a proof of concept I can legitimately do at work. My eventual end goal is to have the Order Management RI working with a new, Unity-based version of CWAB. So, I sat down a few Saturdays ago, with CWAB, an early drop of Unity, and started working. After about eight hours I had the basics of CWAB working: there was a container, and a module loader, global services, and module level services...

I spent two weeks between full time projects (still working on the 2 part time projects I am on) looking back at the build logs from the past 6 months (or so) trying to figure out what metrics we have, what we should track going forward, and what goals we should have for these metrics. I came up with some interesting findings. First, overall unit test code coverage was OK, but not as high as I would like on my projects. Of course, these numbers included generated code, view code, and other things that I usually filter out. Also coverage was fairly flat. For the most part, as we added code, we added tests. This, I think is much better than one of the alternatives, having coverage drop over the course of the project. Here is coverage for the Application...

Someone emailed me recently saying that they couldn’t find enough examples in .NET for talking to the recent proliferation of “Web 2.0 APIs” so I thought I’d put together a list and look at some source. I think that a nice API wrapper is usually a useful thing, but since these APIs are so transparent and basic, there's not really a huge need given LINQ to XML but I understand the knee-jerk reaction to hunt for a wrapper when faced with the word "API." One thing to point out is that 99.9% of these APIs are calling HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri); under the covers the doing something with the resulting string. Some hide the URL creation, some use XmlDocuments, others use XmlSerialization. When you...