LINQed IN

The company I work hosts a decent size data center to support its business (a website hitting around 1.5Mil hits a day, and countless business applications to keep the company in business). Around the end of last year our backup-power (UPS') and air-conditioning...

A comprehensive set of hands on labs and training material has been release for a number of .NET 3.5 Enhancements by the Visual Studio & .NET Framework evangelism team. Nice work guys. "The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations,...

I've become a fan of America's Test Kitchen, a TV and book series about cooking, where they not only show how to cook a great Pork roast, they will try it 10 different ways and see which one works best. They end simply by describing the best way (decided...

I'm probably the last to know, but I had a real need for some solid imaging and graphic library source code. I was incredibly impressed with the AForge library by Andrew Kirillov. Get the source and library here: AForge on code.google.com AForge.NET...

Every now and then I come across a Windows Forms application that has memory leak, or graphic resource leak issues. In managed environments like .NET, some developers overlook that many components wrap un-managed finite resources.  I worked with...

I put together a mug and mouse-mat design with LINQ Reference information. I wanted to have a list of the standard query operators and the new C# Query Expression Syntax on hand at all times. My only concern is spilling coffee over the keyboard when looking...

I was fortunate enough to attend Code Camp in Seattle last weekend. It was great to see the event attended by around 300 keen developers. I took notes throughout some sessions, and posted full details the HookedOnLINQ.com website. Entity Framework Notes...

I've been fielding questions on this topic and struggled for a cohesive answer. Should some people wait until LINQ to Entities and the ADO.NET Entity framework is shipped or go LINQ to SQL now? I saw on Kirk Allen Evan's Blog a pointer to a MSDN Article...

Sorting, prioritizing or ordering features and business objectives (or tasks, or bugs, etc) with a large group of stakeholders can be painful. Often the loudest voice in the room gets there way; some people just sit in the corner too scared to raise...

How much up-front design or architecture to do in an agile project is always a contentious issue. Having the job title with "Architect" in it makes me personally biased; Having a background as a developer and product manager in successful agile...

Answer: > 6 I was looking at a prototype web project today. The one point that struck me was the number of languages and different technologies that were used in assembling a solution: Cleint Side - HTML for the page templates CSS for the stylesheets...

I was impressed on a project a few years ago (CommSee Case Study) that the architecture allowed as much of the application to run (albeit in a limited fashion) even when the database server was in-accessible for some reason (other services relying...

Microsoft released the first public CTP of their Parallel Extensions Framework for .NET. This framework reduces the entry barriers and improves the developer experience when writing Multi-threaded applications. Why is this so important? Because, the laptop...

Now that LINQ is available to all developers with the release of Visual Studio 2008, it is going to take some time to realize all of its uses. I now find I examine a .NET class library object and see if any properties implement an IEnumerable collection...

I've often heard and seen large teams struggle when implementing some agile project practices in large enterprises. I recently joined Corbis who were using many agile practices (introduced by my boss, David Anderson who wrote Agile Management book),...

This came up today in the office, so I thought i'd post a reminder of a useful operator in C# that first appeared in C# 2.0. When Nullable Types were introduced, Microsoft also added an operator to make dealing with null values easier. This avoids a...

Scott Guthrie blogged:  "Today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  You can download the final release using one of the links below: If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note:...

Yesterday when returning home from work in Seattle via bus, a passenger saw that my wife and I were about to sit in different aisles and simply asked if we wanted to swap with him so we could sit together. A simple gesture, but one which we greatly appreciated....

How can we put a price on or demonstrate one system architecture against a proposed (or actual) new system architecture? For instance, how can we predict in advance if a major project is going to require a reduction of increase of staff to maintain? Or...

I've been fielding lots of LINQ related questions recently through comments and emails from the HookedOnLINQ site. I decided to document my responses over the last few months and post the answers. I'd be really interested in feedback and the questions...

I follow Brad Abrams blog and saw that he posted on a very nicely implemented Visual Studio add-in component that allows hyperlinking within code-comments. Vance Morrison (the author of the tool) talks about making code more approachable and how he feels...

I got this email today posted from the HookedOnLINQ Wiki I host:   Troy -- I am a new developer to the LINQ framework and had a few questions that I hope you can field.  Looking at a broad overview of LINQ, I see it as a way to simplify development,...

I've always had the idea for dynamically creating sample data to support unit-testing web-service contracts. I recently had the chance to actually implement my ideas. My rough requirements were as follows - Dynamically generate n-number of consistent...

I think it is pretty poor form that the XSD designer has been pulled from Visual Studio 2008 (AKA Orcas). There is a preview of a new Explorer style XSD viewer, but I see absolutely no reason why the existing one was removed, given the fact that the new...

well, I dropped off the face of the earth for a while. My apologies.... I started a new job as Enterprise Architect at Corbis in early May; Corbis is a mid sized company based in Seattle who sells image rights for all manner of digital media, primarily...