If you haven’t used TransactionScope from the System.Transactions namespace, you don’t know what you’re missing. This system, introduced with .NET 2.0 provides a flexible mechanism for allowing your code to take part in transactions. Many of the built-in subsystems such as ADO.NET automatically enlist in these transactions, but the real power comes from the fact [...]
The scientists are already hard at work at coming up with predictions for the next 10 years. I thought it would be interesting to extract from the list, the predictions that are directly related to software … along with a few recommendations on how to get started today. Augmented Reality This one is almost already [...]
In the months leading up to Christmas ’09, I was pondering what to buy for my kids. Instead of the normal brainless and easy gifts like transformers, gi-joes, and barbies, I wanted to get them something that matters, something that will benefit them. As I browsed around the internet, I came across microscopes, chemistry kits, [...]
Recently, I’ve been reading the book Coders at Work, where author Peter Seibel interviews lots of well known developers. One of the questions that he often asks is whether they have tried Literate Programming, an idea introduced by Donald Knuth in the 70s. Although most of them say no, some of them have tried it [...]
I wrote a post over on the nGenSoft Blog talking about how to gain Static Access to Request-Specific Data: As we have all come to learn in the last decade plus of web development, web applications are inherently stateless. Unlike their native client cousins, every request must be treated as if it was done in [...]
After declaring my love for extension methods in the last post, it only seemed appropriate that it would come up again in an answer I gave to a stackoverflow question. The question stated: In ASP.NET Web Apps , events are fired in particluar order : for simplicity Load => validation =>postback =>rendering Suppose I want to [...]
If you’ve been keeping up with the new developments in the web world, no doubt you’ve heard about Web Workers. A new technology for browsers that will let you take advantage of the client’s true multi-threading capabilities. Currently, it’s only supported in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and some of the latest nightly Chrome builds. I [...]
There are many different types of productivity, today I’m going to talk about the things that you do on a day to day basis. A few years ago, I found myself unhappy with my level of productivity and decided to figure out a way to manage my time better. As one would do when trying [...]
We’ve been pushing pretty hard at work recently to become masters of the javascript language. Since we use it so extensively, and recent browser improvements such as compilation to native code of javascript … it means that it’s certainly not going away. On the server-side, we use ASP.NET MVC and have come to be quite [...]
While there are some examples of accessing the Twitter API via C# on the web, I couldn’t really find any good samples of how to do a search. There were some examples that took the REST route and used raw http requests. While others explored the JSON formatting capabilities of the twitter API. In the [...]