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After I graduated from the HIO Enschede (B.Sc level) in '94 I have worked with a lot of different platforms and environments: from 4GL's like System Builder, uniVerse and Magic to C++ on AIX to Java to Perl on Linux to C# on .NET. All these platforms and environments had one thing in common: their creators were convinced their platform was the best and greatest and easiest to write software with. To some extend, each and every one of them were decent platforms and it was perfectly possible to write software with them though I'll leave the classification whether they were / are the greatest and easiest to the reader. I'll try to make clear below why this dull intro is important. Yesterday I watched the live stream of the PDC '09...

Did you know that you can train yourself for what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and C# 4.0 (also VB) ? The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview is available for more than a week now and it includes lots of slide decks, demos and labs covering the following topics: Whats New In the .NET Framework 4 Whats New In Visual Studio 2010 Video: Downloading And Installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Demo: Hello Visual Studio 2010 Common Language Runtime Demo: System.Threading.Barrier Demo Demo: System.Threading.CountdownEvent Managed Languages What's New In C# 4 and Visual Basic 10 Video: Fixing PIA Pains with Type Equivalence Demo: Managed Languages 10-in-1 Lab: Introduction To F# Lab: Visual Studio 2010: Office...

Today, it's been exactly 6 years ago we released the first version of LLBLGen Pro , v1.0.2003.1 after a development period of roughly 9 months (Sunday september 7th 2003, late in the evening). It was a big gamble, would it succeed or fail? We got our first customer within 9 minutes after release and we then knew it would be a success. And it still is, with thousands of companies using it world-wide, from small mom & pop shops to the biggest banks on the planet. Honestly, we hoped for success but that it took off this big was beyond our expectations. A big thank you! to all of our loyal customers who trusted our work in the past 6 years and who are keep trusting it. Needless to say, we're still going strong and are looking forward...

LLBLGen Pro works with SQL Azure, that is, the generated code and the runtime library. There are a couple of things you should be aware of, and I'll enlist them briefly below. The thing which doesn't work is creating a project from a SQL Azure database, as SQL Azure has no meta-data tables publicly available to the connected user (also a reason why for example SQL Server Management Studio doesn't work with SQL Azure at the moment) The things to be aware of are the following when you want to work with SQL Azure and LLBLGen Pro are the following: SQL Azure doesn't support catalog names in the queries. As LLBLGen Pro supports multiple catalogs per project, and thus cross-catalog queries, you can only use one catalog in your project...

In the comments section of Ayende's blog , I recently debated the usage of principles like the ones in SOLID and argued that these principles aren't really the important thing to focus on. Instead, people should focus on thinking . In the Netherlands we have an old saying: "Bezint eer ge begint", which translated to English is something like "Think everything through before you start". Now, before I wake up the anti-Waterfall people , I'd like to add that this post isn't about Waterfall at all. Instead, I'd like to line out how I write my software, how thinking is an essential part of every step I take in the whole process and will illustrate it with an example which hopefully will illustrate that some...

If you're using Linq and Resharper, you've probably seen the warning Resharper shows when you use a foreach loop in which you use the loop variable in a Linq extension method (be it on IQueryable<T> or IEnumerable<T>). In case you don't know what it is or what damage it can do if you ignore the issue, I'll give you a database oriented query (so on IQueryable<T>, using LLBLGen Pro 's Linq provider) which creates a dynamic Where clause based on input, the typical scenario you should be careful with when it comes to this particular problem. var customers = from o in metaData.Order join c in metaData.Customer on o.CustomerId equals c.CustomerId into oc from x in oc.DefaultIfEmpty() select new { CustomerId =...

By popular demand, I've attached the C# source code to this post (click header to view the post with the attachment) of my Multi-value Dictionary class, which can also merge dictionaries into itself and which implements ILookup<T, V> as well. It's part of Algorithmia, our upcoming data-structure and algorithm library which will ship with LLBLGen Pro v3.0 later this year. The code is released under the BSD2 license, see the enclosed readme.txt. The class comes with its own general purpose Grouping<T, V> class as well and of course its own ToMultiValueDictionary() extension method. I hope this is useful to others. Read More...

So I’ve attended the 2nd ALT.NET conference in Israel and I took my video cam with me… although its a HD Cam (SONY HDR-SR7) i could not find a place to host the HD videos in and had to downgrade them to WMV to be able to upload them to YouTube. (don’t mention MS Silverlight streaming as it has a problem with files larger then 100meg ! – can you make a 1hr or HD movie smaller then 100meg ? I DONT THINK SO !) Update: Due to youtube 10min limitation… the movies had been rejected… moving to another video host and adding youtube to the Sucks video hosting services list. Anyway here are the Videos… and the list will be updates as content will be ready: Video : The morning talk: Each Alt.NET conf starts with a morning talk where the rules of the conference...

So I’ve attended the 2nd ALT.NET conference in Israel and I took my video cam with me… although its a HD Cam (SONY HDR-SR7) i could not find a place to host the HD videos in and had to downgrade them to WMV to be able to upload them to YouTube. (don’t mention MS Silverlight streaming as it has a problem with files larger then 100meg ! – can you make a 1hr or HD movie smaller then 100meg ?  I DONT THINK SO !) Anyway here are the Videos… and the list will be updates as content will be ready: Video : The morning talk: Each Alt.NET conf starts with a morning talk where the rules of the conference are being reviewed with the participants (the rules are simple, you can move between lectures, you can talk about anything… and when you are done...

I just ran into a weird issue. During profiling I saw that controls on a form which was already closed were still reacting to events. I checked whether the Dispose() routine of the particular Form was called, but it wasn't. However, the Dispose() routine of other forms was called after it was closed, as in: immediately. The difference between the two situations was that if I used Form.ShowDialog(parentForm), a call to Close() on the particular form didn't call Dispose. Checking the Form.Close() documentation describes this behavior: The two conditions when a form is not disposed on Close is when (1) it is part of a multiple-document interface (MDI) application, and the form is not visible; and (2) you have displayed the form using ShowDialog...