February 2010 Entries
On the Aeshen blog, I just posted an article about multithreading and parallel coding. There’s lots of discussion about new frameworks to make work easier, but there are many things you can do without terrible effort with today’s languages and tools. Link: http://aeshen.com/wordpress/2010/02/multithreading-for-the-future/
I’ve just finished up my largest ASP.NET effort to date. It’s nothing huge, but I tried to use standard ASP.NET patterns and practices throughout. I learned a number of lessons! We turned off ViewState in order to save bandwidth. This introduced some problems that I didn’t expect. For one thing, the IsPostback property can’t be used for deciding whether or not to databind – always databind! Since the web is stateless, the values involved in a bind are usually stored in ViewState so you only need to bind once. Clearly you need to do that manually without it. ...
In a recent large web site that I worked on, we used LINQ for the data access/model. This definitely caused some pain in places. What I discovered is just how well-suited LINQ is to scenarios where ad-hoc queries are allowed. In fact, if you need to call stored procedures for updates, but can use queries for read-only operations, then you are in good shape. I’ve discussed this in a previous post, but I had hoped that I would come up with some workarounds. One problem that lingers is that if you get an entity back, say a Person object, then...
I’ve just posted an article on my thoughts about passionate programmers. Am I crazy or did I hit the nail on the head? Link: http://aeshen.com/wordpress/2010/02/passionate-programmers/
I’ve posted a new article about social networking for modern corporations on the Aeshen blog. It’s a little long and not my typical development focus, but I think it’s interesting! Link: http://aeshen.com/wordpress/2010/02/social-networking-challenges/
In the Last Post Previously, I’ve spoken about about Visual Studio and Expression Blend, styles and templates, and some of the important foundations of XAML-based databinding. In this post, learn about customizing your applications by writing reusable code components that can be linked in declaratively. Making It Do Your Bidding To really make your Silverlight application look good, you’re going to need to resort to custom code sometimes. The instinctive thing to do is to wire up event handlers to run at various times to create objects, adjust bounded values, or to start animations. As much as...
In Case You’ve Just Tuned In… In my previous post, I talked about Visual Studio vs. Expression Blend, styles, and templates. In this post I’ll talk about databinding. The Ties That Bind As with WPF, databinding is an incredibly powerful feature of Silverlight. The ability to declare a relationship between properties of an element and the properties of an object is amazing. You can bind the properties of Silverlight controls to any CLR object’s public properties, but it will be a one-time binding only. Ideally, you’d probably like it if a Label would update when its associated...
I recently gave a talk for the Corvallis .NET User’s Group (CDNUG) about using Silverlight as a developer. Silverlight is pitched as a Flash-replacer, a video streaming enabler, and a designer’s dream, but it doesn’t get much love for business applications or more general use. This isn’t actually fair, as Silverlight has amazing databinding and custom presentation features just like it’s older brother WPF. Tooling Around The first challenge to developers with Silverlight is the tooling. We devs are used to our environment being a certain way. Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, and other similar applications use...