The .NET Framework 4.0 contains a plethora of command line tools ranging from build, deployment, debugging, security to Interop tools, and so on. Here’s a list of important command line tools in the .NET Framework 4.0 which can be run using the Visual Studio Command Prompt. The description of these tools has been taken from the MSDN documentation.

How does one test the user-interface of a web application? Too often, the answer seems to be 'clumsily, slowly, and not very well'. The technology of automated, repeatable, testing of websites is still developing, but it exists;  and Michael Sorens is here to describe an even better approach based on Selenium

Should every Visual Studio project really be in its own assembly? And what does 'Copy Local=True' really mean? Patrick Smacchia is no stranger to large .NET projects,  is well placed to lay a few myths to rest, and gives some advice that promises up to a tenfold increase in speed of compilation.

In this article, we will see how to log the SQL queries that get generated by Entity Framework. We will also some see profiling tools available.

In this blog post, I will cover two interesting tools that, when combined, can bring great value and speed at the beginning of any new software project that has to meet standards that are to be re-used for every project. The tools? Templify and NuGet.

Every project starts the same way:you create a place to put solution artefacts,on one file system, on one computer.Templify helps you work smart, not hardby reducing repetition.

NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. NuGet is a member of the ASP.NET Gallery in the Outercurve Foundation

Microsoft's been filling out the Web Stack with more and more right-sized LEGO pieces lately, and today ScottGu announced the developer preview of NuPack. It's a piece of the stack that's been notably missing for years and after using it for a while now, I'm not sure how I lived without it.

NuPack is a package management system for .NET. The goal of NuPack is to make the process of incorporating third party libraries into your solutions as simple as possible.

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

Learn how Umbraco – the fastest growing open source ASP.NET CMS – can help you build amazing websites, without restricting the way you write your markup, or the way you write Controls. In this session you’ll not only get an overview of what Umbraco has to offer and how to build a complete site in less than an hour, but also learn how to extend it. We’ll look at integrating with Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Azure, and with a little luck, a speaking plastic rabbit too, using nothing but Umbraco, Visual Studio and a few lines of .NET code.

I hadn’t got around to looking at it before but Neils Hartvig (@umbraco on twitter) gave a great talk about Umbraco Basics at Tech Ed Europe this year and you can watch it here.

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Drop your bags, fix a drink, and grab the Windows CD—it's time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives' computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you're cursing all the auto-starting crapware.

DirSync Pro (Directory Synchronize Pro) is a small, but powerful utility for file and folder synchronization. DirSync Pro can be used to synchronize the content of one or many folders recursively.

HDGraph helps you to free disk space : it finds for you the largest folders on your drive.
 
It's a free tool allowing to graphically display the hard disk space usage : it shows all the directories and subdirectories of the hard drive on a single graph, allowing to see the largest directories at a glance.
 
It is compatible with all storage visible in the Windows explorer : folder of hard disk drive, USB key, network folder, CD, DVD, etc…

OverDisk is a disk usage browser. It can be used to quickly find out how a partition's space is distributed among the file system hierarchy.

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags.

It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.

Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library.

Smells Like Teen Spirit van Nirvana blijft op de eerste plaats, voor het vijfde jaar op rij en voor het negende jaar in totaal. De nummers twee en drie verwisselen van plaats. Metallica was twee jaar lang de dichtste belager van Nirvana, maar die rol wordt nu overgekomen door Stairway to Heaven van Led Zeppelin, dat nog nooit zo hoog stond. A Day in the Life van The Beatles is een opmerklijke hoogste stijger. Meer…

De medioren en senioren van vandaag zijn niet meer de bejaarden van dertig jaar geleden, maar dat neemt niet weg dat hun eerste kennismaking met moderne technologie en communicatie niet altijd van een leien dakje gaat. Sms'en, bijvoorbeeld, vergt toch enige precisie én kennis van de korteberichtjesetiquette. Op When Parents Text laten jongelui gênante/grappige/cryptische sms'jes van hun ouders ('Me: i want a tattoo for Christmas / Mom: as long as it says i <3 mom!', 'Mom: Hi. What are you doing? / Me: At the library studying for my organic chem exam. / Mom: Homo. / Me: Excuse me? / Mom: I meant to spell GOOD. sorry.' of 'Mom: @(*.*)@ / Me: ??? / Mom: its a monkey lol') achter.

During the last few weeks, I've had the chance to go more in depth with jQyery and general site performance. I've found some techniques that makes my site go much faster. I don't know if they're all best practice, but this article is meant to at least give you some good ideas.

Tonido allows you to access and share ALL of your desktop's files, documents, photos, music and videos from any­where through a web browser or your smartphone. No Uploading,
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Taking a smartphone out of the box for the first time can elicit a wide spectrum of emotions, starting with unadulterated excitement that can quickly devolve into panic, chaos, and confusion: what do you do now? How do you make it awesome? How do you emanate an air of "cool" on the subway by using apps specifically designed to make you look like a badass? Well, fear not, newly-minted Android smartphone owner: as always, we've got your back. Read on for all the apps, accessories, and tips you should be investigating right this very second.

Q² or QuickQuery Editor is an editor that helps prototyping queries on complex schema's by automating the writing of queries. No need to type complex queries with join conditions you need to look up, just double-click the relation to use, the columns to show,…

The features of the editor include:
- Support for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases
- Automatically discovers columns; double-click to add them in the query
- Automatically discovers table references and proposes them as joins
- Supports inner and outer joins
- Aliassing of tables and/or columns
- Grouping operators and easy grouping correction/removal
- Conditions on columns as well as a custom Where field
- Saving query sessions
- …

Let us explore few concepts about Delegates, Anonymous methods, Lambdas and Expression Trees. These code examples are pretty simple, you can fire up a C# Console application in Visual Studio and try these examples if you are interested.

jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform.

A list of some good Coding Standard Documents. They are useful not just from a review perspective – going through these documents can definitely help you and me to iron out few hidden glitches we might have in the programming portion of our brain.

Microsoft .NET Framework version 4 includes a major revision of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with heavy investments in performance. This new revision introduces significant design changes from the previous versions of WF that shipped as part of .NET Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5. It has been re-architected from the core of the programming model, runtime, and tooling to greatly improve performance and usability. This topic shows the important performance characteristics of these revisions and compares them against those of the previous version.

Individual workflow component performance has increased by orders of magnitude between WF3 and WF4. This leaves the gap between hand-coded Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and WCF workflow services to be quite small. Workflow latency has been significantly reduced in WF4. Persistence performance has increased by a factor of 2.5 – 3.0. Health monitoring by means of workflow tracking has significantly less overhead.

Naast sites als Megaupload en Rapidshare om bestanden te delen hebben we gelukkig ook fraaiere sites zoals Wetransfer. Sinds kort is er een nieuwe service actief met een twist, Ge.tt maakt het mogelijk om bestanden al te downloaden of te streamen terwijl je ze nog uploadt.

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DataContract versioning requires when some modification has been done to the existing DataContract exposed to the client from the service or vice versa. If either service or client is changing the schema of DataContract exposed then new version of DataContract come into action and both party involved in communication should be able to accommodate the changes done in the DataContract.

In this article, I am going to show how to enable windows authentication on WCF Data Service. 

Various native .NET framework types include an overloaded version of the ToString method that accepts a format string. This reference sheet provides a list of standard formats and custom format specifiers for numeric types, DateTimes, GUIDs and enums.

This article is expected to
- Introduce patterns to you in a simple, human readable (?) way
- Train you how to really 'Apply' patterns (you can learn patterns easily, but to apply them to solve a problem, you need real design skills)
- Provide you a fair idea regarding the contexts for applying the following patterns – Builder, Observer, Strategy and Decorator (well, they are few popular design patterns)
- Demonstrate you how to apply the Observer pattern, to solve a design problem

ExtensionMethod.NET is a database of C# 3.0, F# and Visual Basic 2008 extension methods. It contains many user-rated extension methods that will expand your code library immediately.

Extension methods add functionality to existing classes and allow you to expand the .NET framework. This way your favorite functions integrate seamlessly into the framework. For more information about extension methods visit the C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 2008 MSDN Library pages.

Welcome to our humble abode, we're a new service aiming to bridge the gap between Twitter and Facebook. We're doing this by sending tweets to Facebook and Facebook comments back to Twitter.

Invited to a party and don’t know what to buy the party animal? We feel you.
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This is a review of the current available collection types in .NET Framework 4.0

A .NET attribute is an object, that provides a mechanism to associate information (metadata) with an element in your program. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) then uses these attributes and determines how to interact with these elements. You can also create custom attributes and use reflection to read them later.

Here’s a list of important .NET attributes that is commonly used in projects and proves very useful if you about them beforehand. This is just a compilation (arranged alphabetically) and clicking on each attribute will take you to a msdn link which explains its usage with an example.

This article will give a step by step visual explanation of how to create a REST enabled WCF service.

I got a mail asking question, “How could we remove .SVC from a WCF REST Service? “  

This article will give step by step walkthrough
1.    How to create a basic WCF 4.0 Service?
2.    How to host WCF Service in IIS 7.5?
3.    Hot to test service in a client.

Forms pose a series of usability and accessibility challenges, many of which are made more complex when you need to build a form to fit into a small space. Tightly spaced forms can look great on paper, but they often ignore accessibility issues altogether.

A designer recently handed me a compact-form design that included the oft-seen technique of putting field names directly inside of the text fields themselves.

If you are looking for some introduction material to Microsoft Workflow Foundation 4.0 then here are a couple of links and tips.

An interface can be created to define a contract containing members that classes that implement it must provide. Interfaces can define events, sometimes leading to classes that implement several interfaces being required to declare an event name twice.

Regular expression can be effectively used to get performance benefit in certain cases.

Your Android is supposed to keep you instantly connected to your digital life. It can do that, but it needs some help. These best-of-class applications make sending files, syncing music, swapping web sites, and other phone-computer hook-ups so much easier.

The most effective way to document .NET code so that others can understand it and use it, is to use XML Documentation and SandCastle. It isn't that easy. Michael Sorens produces the easy guide to the process that Microsoft never managed, and introduces several applications that help.

In one product of our solution we needed to record the full history of some entities. What does this mean? It means we create a history entry whenever the state of the corresponding entity changes.

When doing this there are basically two ways one can choose – either implicitly generate the history records or doing it explicitly. To go the implicit route we could have used an interceptor mechanism to automatically and transparently create  a history record whenever the entity changes and the change is persisted to the database.

Since we chose to go the explicit route creating a history for an entity became a domain concept.

Generics provide a way for developers to define subroutines, functions, fields, properties as well as classes, structures, interfaces and even delegates in such a way that the parameters are not of any particular type.  In a sense the constructs are defined in a generic approach.
The .NET Framework contains the following namespaces:System.Collections, System.Collections.Generic.    The latter mimics very much the features of the former.

One of the biggest advantages of Android over iPhone is widgets. Android has them, iPhone does not.

U heeft net als ieder normaal mens totaal geen boodschap aan een nieuw mega-populaire 16-jarige pussy magnet Justin Bieber, maar u zweeft wel graag weg op de klanken van pak ‘m beet Sigur Rós, Brian Eno of andere ambienthelden?

Before a query can be executed, the Entity Framework generates a set of views that are used to access the database. The Entity Framework generates views the first time that a query is executed and then maintains these views for the lifetime of the ObjectContext instance. Because view generation is a significant part of the overall cost of executing a single query, the Entity Framework enables you to pre-generate these views and include them in the compiled project.

By default WCF will blow the whistle on applications when they exchange data (by calling a service) that exceeds certain limits imposed by the WCF runtime. These are limits regarding the size of messages, the complexity of the message (such as the number of objects in the object graph), the size of elements in the message and other characteristics of the data exchanged. Exceeding this limits result in the breaking the communication and reporting of this situation as an exception, either on the client or the service side.

This article gives you an ultra-fast run down on how to start Unit Testing in Entity Framework 4.0 using C#; applying a suitable Code Generation Item to your Entity Data Model (EDMX) file, and building a Unit Test Project in Visual Studio 2010.

ADO.NET Entity Framework is the Object Relational Mapping(ORM) framework from Microsoft which enables us to map .NET classes to objects(tables,views,stored procedures..etc) in a relational database.While studying any ORM framework it’s important to know about, how it handles concurrency and ensures data consistency.In this post we will look into what options ADO.NET Entity Framework provides for ensuring this consistency.

In this article I’m going to show how you can use self tracking entities (which are new in the Entity Framework V4) in combination with Silverlight 4. I’m also going to show how to optimize self tracking entities by making an adjustment to the self tracking entities T4 template, which doesn’t only benefit Silverlight clients, but all .Net clients that make use of self tracking entities.

Expression Trees comes very handy when you want your lambda expression to be evaluated only when the object needs it to be compiled. Generally when we pass an annonymous delegate it builds the entire Expression Tree and C# is capable of building the expression at runtime. In this article I will explain how you could decompose an expression into an Expression Tree

This blog entry is going to cover a few things, based on a full end-to-end implementation of a project from the WCF RESTful Web Services, to the ASP.NET MVC Site, and finally the jQuery calling those same services.

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. It shields the programmer from the idiosyncrasies in the way that each browser implements the language: it makes life easier by doing all the routine chores and takes the pain out of AJAX. It also introduces a 'Wow' factor to browser-based applications.

Caching is a fundamental component of working software. The role of any cache is to decrease the performance footprint of data I/O by moving it as close as possible to the execution logic. At the lowest level of computing, a thread relies on a CPU cache to be loaded up each time the thread context is switched. At higher levels, caches are used to offload data from a database into a local application memory store or, say, a Lucene directory for fast indexing of data.

The objective of this post is to brief how you can leverage the lazy initialization support available in MEF. We’ll examine MEF and Lazy, and then we’ll see how to use them together.

The new Windows Workflow Foundation technology that ships with .NET Framework 4 represents a major improvement in performance and developer productivity and realizes a goal of declarative application development for business logic.  Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a Microsoft technology for defining, executing, and managing workflows. This technology was first released in November 2006 as a part of .NET Framework 3.0. The current version (4.0) was released as part of the .NET Framework 4.0. The major refinement of the new version is the tighter integration of WF with Windows Communication Foundation. 

WebAppers is a blog dedicated to share top quality open source resources for web developer and web designer daily. As a web designer, you’ll find some of the best free icons, stock photos, brushes, fonts and design inspirations. As a web developer, you’ll also find some of the best Javascript and Ajax components like modal windows, menus, galleries, tooltips, charts, calendars plugins and a lot more …

The Entity Framework is a set of technologies in ADO.NET that support the development of data-oriented software applications. Architects and developers of data-oriented applications have struggled with the need to achieve two very different objectives. They must model the entities, relationships, and logic of the business problems they are solving, and they must also work with the data engines used to store and retrieve the data. The data may span multiple storage systems, each with its own protocols; even applications that work with a single storage system must balance the requirements of the storage system against the requirements of writing efficient and maintainable application code.

This white paper describes and demonstrates how to write testable code with the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. This paper does not try to focus on a specific testing methodology, like test-driven design (TDD) or behavior-driven design (BDD). Instead this paper will focus on how to write code that uses the ADO.NET Entity Framework yet remains easy to isolate and test in an automated fashion. We’ll look at common design patterns that facilitate testing in data access scenarios and see how to apply those patterns when using the framework. We’ll also look at specific features of the framework to see how those features can work in testable code.

A generic method for attaching detached object graphs to an Entity Framework context.

A problem I run into a lot when evangelizing IronRuby is the language barrier. Just like real life, people are scared when they visit a country where they do not know the local language. Same thing with C# developers who are afraid to learn other languages.

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Werken met sneltoetsen is veel handiger werken dan met de muis. Je gebruikt de muis niet en hoeft deze dus ook niet continu te positioneren (een ingewikkeld oog-hand coordinatie spelletje). Ook blijven je handen op hun plaats; let eens op hoe vaak je nu wisselt tussen muis en toetsenbord. Constant! Met sneltoetsen ontwikkel je je motorisch geheugen, zoals je ook pincodes onthoudt: binnen afzienbare bedient je programma’s blindelings!