DotNetKicks.com - Stories tagged with Design

Daydreaming about jQuery Mobile and the WebAPI

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:42:57 GMT

I recently blogged about programming for the future of mobile with jQuery Mobile and the WebAPI. You probably heard that jQuery Mobile 1.0 was released earlier this week. Although it will take a while before we will see some actual results from the WebAPI initiative, that shouldn't keep us from letting our minds play with things that might be possible one day using the WebAPI.

Lazy Loading OR On-Demand Loading

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:56:33 GMT

Is lazy loading really is "Lazy" loading or is it "On-Demand" loading...

The benefits to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 02:33:56 GMT

There are several benefits to using cascading style sheets (CSS) in the design of a website, but they have lacked the attention it deserves partially due of a large learning curve needed to fully understand its capabilities. There has been a real emphasis recently on CSS because of the Web 2.0 movement in the industry over the use of table based designs.

Repository and Unit of Work T4 Template for Entity Framework

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:22:37 GMT

Two weeks ago I wrote the Revisiting the Repository and Unit of Work Patterns with Entity Framework post. One thing that I thought would be nice was to have an automatic code generation that will help me to build these patterns without sweating. So I sat down and created a T4 Template to auto generate the same patterns.

Introducing Code Rocket

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:54:52 GMT

This article introduces you to Code Rocket's main features. Code Rocket is a pseudocode and flowchart design and visualization tool for Visual Studio (and Eclipse). It gives you on demand access to the pseudocode and flowchart views of your methods and always keeps the design in sync with the code. The content was the basis of a presentation given at TechMeetup Aberdeen. You can download the slides and sample code for the example.

Amazing Strategy!!

Sat, 01 May 2010 15:17:55 GMT

I recently downloaded a cool fighter plane game (iFighter lite) on my iPhone. As I started playing, I felt that plane is moving a bit slow!! But soon enough I saw a little perk on the screen and I flew over it and suddenly plane's speed increased. Soon enough, enemy planes started attacking me and I shot back at them. But again I felt my bullets were too slow! I shot down few planes and a new perk showed up on the screen. As soon as I collected it, my plane started shooting more bullets per attack!! Yeeee hoo!!! I started enjoying this and before I knew, I by mistake collected a "skull and bones" perk and "darrnn!!" I said, cause I knew now my plane had lost those powerful bullets :( Now, of course I am not writing a review about the human behavior while playing games on iPhone! But what I am trying to highlight here is the plane's ability to act differently in certain conditions! And that's something the Strategy Design Pattern allows us to do. I'll try to use this game as an analogy to discuss about Strategy Design Pattern. Definition: Define a family of algorithms, encapsulate each one, and make them interchangeable. Strategy lets the algorithm vary independently from clients that use it.

Strategy Pattern at work

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:36:17 GMT

An example of the usage of the Strategy pattern to maintain customizations for customers from different countries.

AJAX publish/subscribe with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:08:26 GMT

Calling long running web server process and locking the user for a while in web applications with the typical for the HTTP request/replay way can be critical for the user expirience. Even more, possibly we don't get back the data due to problems with the network connection or browser timeouts. Even if on top of unreliable protocol like HTTP we can provide some abstraction level to ensure we'll get the result from the web server. We could simulate the publish/subscribe pattern in ajax. Furthermore our communication with the web server is asynchronous and allows our application to respond better to the user interactions.

Abstracting away Dependencies for Simpler code

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:00:07 GMT

Taking a look at the pain points around having direct knowledge of a web service can bring for not only testing, but in running your application. Once we understand the pain points we will take a look at how to abstract them away with the adapter pattern.

Why I prefer surrogate keys instead of natural keys in database design

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:18:22 GMT

A practical field tested answer why are surrogate keys better than natural keys in database design.

The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP ) « Maximum C#

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:11:01 GMT

FUNCTIONS THAT USE POINTERS OR REFERENCES TO BASE CLASSES MUST BE ABLE TO USE OBJECTS OF DERIVED CLASSES WITHOUT KNOWING IT.

Expression Design: Step By Step Designing my Dragon icon

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:25:19 GMT

Is a step by step tutorial using the expression design tools to create an icon in this case of a dragon. The idea here is to show the power of the expression tools. This same techniques can be used for the design of interfaces

How to quickly improve user interface

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:27:27 GMT

The list of things that developers may improve just in minutes and make their programs looking more professional and attractive.

Spearmen, Javelin Throwers, and the State Pattern, oh my!

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:32:15 GMT

Jamie Farser & Ayende Rahein recently had a conversation about using the State Pattern for units in a game Jamie is building. I've been following along trying to figure my way through the state pattern as well, and decided to take a stab at my own solution to Jamie's problem.

The 'Always Valid Entity' is not a fallacy

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:59:29 GMT

Following Jeffrey Palermo's post on the fallacy of the always-valid entity, this article being to look at how an 'always-valid' entity may be implemented.

The 'Always Valid Entity' is not a fallacy

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:59:29 GMT

Following Jeffrey Palermo's post on the fallacy of the always-valid entity, this article being to look at how an 'always-valid' entity may be implemented.

Aggregator Provider Pattern: White Paper and Samples

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:01:02 GMT

Provider Aggregator Pattern is an extension of Provider Pattern, which enables us to create and utilize multiple instance of the class having the same provider interface. In this pattern, there is an Aggregator class which implements the provider interface and contains a collection of instances of classes having the same provider interface.

Learning about the Strategy Design Pattern

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:46:02 GMT

Taking a how you can use the Strategy Design Pattern in your applications. We will start off by looking at code which does not utilize this pattern and then take a look at how we can refactor the code base to utilize the Strategy Pattern.

Learning about the Strategy Design Pattern

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:46:02 GMT

Use Event Aggregator to make your application more extensible

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:01:03 GMT

Recently, in KiGG/DotNetShoutout we have integrated Twitter, nothing complex, very basic thing like when a story is submitted or appears in the front page it will broadcast in Twitter and like our feed it will post the short url of the original story (Cant resist to do some shameless marketing for DotNetShoutout). Since it is a new requirement, initially I have modified the StoryService constructor to include the twitter client as a new argument and use it after the story is added in the database, the code is something like the following:...

Identifying the Run-Time and the Design Mode

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:35:34 GMT

Some logic (like connecting to a database) is not meant to be called when the application is in design mode. Opening a Form, or a UserControl, in the Visual Studio Designer (or other IDE design module), which is trying to connect to a database in its constructor or in its Load or Shown event handler will end up with a Designer exception. Handling a database connection is a run-time job only! This situation may be avoided if the run-time specific code is properly handled.

Refactoring Service Dependencies to Separated Interface

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:47:26 GMT

Fantastic article by Billy McCafferty on content you already know... Don't you?? This covers some of the core points that any modern developer simply must know if they want to be taken seriously on all but the most trivial projects.

'Linq to Gac' : Use Linq to Power Query your Gac via C# to Fusion

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 06:59:03 GMT

This post gets the GAC via Linq to bend your way. How? A Fusion Wrapper to IEnumerable over your Gac. No nasty PInvokes to deal with. It's all clean C# which is here to use. We owe a debt to the Mono project for this as well as a very smart Microsoft staff member to be give credit when we can find the page again. Be careful however...Our last post cranked through your registry. This post gets you the GAC. Here is what is done with a holistic post later: * All files we can find (if you specify them) * The Gac (all of it and even the other two 'sub-gacs' if you want * Environmental Stuff (Path variable, etc. but we actually parse them and produce another tree and it fits our code) * A lot more (think all things inside you box) You can even join all this data if you can find the right keys. We joined our registry to our file system 'where the registry key value as a path' (where is was a valid path) didn't exist. Earth-shattering? No. Faster then any virus checker we've tried? ABSOLUTELY. Relevant to virus checkers? No not really actually..

Use objects insted of primitives as method parameters

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:06:14 GMT

Don't send entity id's in method calls because sooner or later they will have to do unnecessary calls to the database. Instead, use objects which have a conceptual meaning in that message

Screen monitor calibration for Web designers

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:31:46 GMT

Very good methods of Color management for designers. Free Gamma and Monitor Profile tools here: http://www.quickgamma.de/indexen.html http://quickgamma.de/QuickMonitorProfile/indexen.html