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Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - November 21-23, 2009 Web Development ASP.NET MVC: Creating reports using Chart control T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action Web Application Configuration Analyzer (WACA) The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 – Query Interfaces Using the Microsoft Ajax Library 3.5 with the CDN Microsoft AJAX Library Preview 6 & Data Binding Web Design User Interface Design Is Not About Lorem Ipsum And Pretty Boxes The Ultimate...( read more ) Read More...

I am yet to find a proper sample on how to do realistic Test Driven Development (TDD) and how to write proper unit tests for complex business applications, that gives you enough confidence to stop doing manual tests anymore. Generally the samples show you how to test a Stack or a LinkedList, which is far simpler than testing a typical N-tier application, especially if you are using Entity Framework or Linq to SQL or some ORM in data access layer, and doing logging, validation, caching, error handling at middle tier. There are many articles , blog posts , video tutorials on how to write unit tests, which I believe are all very good starting points. But all these examples show you basic tests, not good enough to let your QA team go. So, let me...

More and more often I've been seeing C# code like this: var Data = GetData(); What on earth does GetData() return? This code is not as maintainable as it could be and is not as maintainable as it should be. Doesn't explicitly declaring the variable type make the code more readable, understandable and ultimately more maintainable? DataTable Data = GetData(); Ahhh, GetData() returns a DataTable. I know that var has uses but I wish it would have been named something much longer because typing 'var' is too easy. Perhaps it should have been named AutomaticTypeVar or even AutoVar to reduce the lazy misuse. Just my 2 cents. Steve Wellens Read More...

Just a decade and a half ago, the process of building a simple Windows-based application could have been described as a nightmare. The introduction of Visual Basic changed it so developers could for the first time implement Windows applications in an intuitive, graphical environment by dragging controls onto a form. The web revolution is here and now. Web had become very quickly the platform of choice for all kind of applications. The demand for web applications is ever growing and cloud computing...( read more ) Read More...

In the previous post of the Introduction to the Reactive Framework series, we covered how to create new IObservable<T> instances, either from scratch or from existing sequences. What this allowed us to do was turn an operation which was previously interactive, such as iterating over a collection, to a reactive, where I could have multiple listeners reacting to the same collection concurrently. This has nice implications for allowing us to scale our application in interesting ways. This time, let’s take another angle on making asynchronous programming easier. Let’s get caught up to where we are today: Part I – Introduction Part II – Duality of Enumerable/Observable Part III – From Events to Observables Part IV – From Enumerables to Observables...

As you may have noticed, I’ve been blogging a bit about the Reactive Framework , now the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) and how it will change the way we approach asynchronous and event-based programming. Just as LINQ to Objects changed the way we deal with collections, The Reactive Extensions will change the way we deal with asynchronous and event-based programming. Fast forward to today, Rx has been released on Microsoft DevLabs for not only .NET 4 Beta 2, but also .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3 as well. If you’re not familiar with Rx, it is a library for composing asynchronous and event based programs together using observable collections (IObservable<T>). This is especially important in the development of Silverlight, which disallows...

Due to Visual WebGui cloud application platform, developers can now deploy their applications to Windows Azure with the click of a button with no re-writes or new programming skills needed. “(now we can) quickly achieve what, a year ago, would have taken more people, more money, and a lot more time. It’s going to open up applications of sorts we’ve never seen before.” The ease of using Visual WebGui was a key benefit. Noted Naylor, “There was no learning curve with Visual WebGui. To a Windows developer...( read more ) Read More...

Hi everyone, First of all,this is my first article so if you have any suggestions or comments on my article please post it. Introduction: Many of us created a group options using "select" like this : <SELECT id="myselect"> <OPTGROUP LABEL="COUNTRY"> <OPTION LABEL="country1"> country1 </OPTION> <OPTION LABEL="country1">country1</OPTION> </OPTGROUP> <OPTGROUP LABEL="STATE"> <OPTION LABEL="STATE1"> STATE1 </OPTION> <OPTION LABEL="STATE2">STATE2</OPTION> </OPTGROUP> </SELECT> as you can see it's pretty easy to do it using select tag,you can refer to this W3C site for more information...

In the previous post in this series, we covered how to turn .NET events into first class values through IObservable instances. By doing so, we were able to do much more interesting things than just subscribe and unsubscribe, instead we were able to create a mouse drag event with little effort through composition. In this post, let’s look at going from push to pull by turning collections into IObservable<T> instances. Let’s get caught up to where we are today: Part I – Introduction Part II – Duality of Enumerable/Observable Part III – From Events to Observables From IEnumerables To Observables As you may remember from the first post and second post in this series, we covered going from IEnumerable<T> to IObservable<T> and the...

I had a request from my previous post about the DoneDone app to give a little insight on how the loading screens were created. I finally got round to creating an example project which shows one way of creating this sort of effect. The way I created the effect was to create a few controls (image view, activity indicator and message) on top of the view that's being displayed and mark them all as hidden by default. When the loading screen is to be shown - it will simply enable these controls to be viewed...( read more ) Read More...