DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by JamesNK

LightSpeed 4.0 .NET ORM released

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:48:33 GMT

The LightSpeed 4.0 ORM has been released and features distributed application support so you can work transparently with entities across a network, and Web enhancements that simplify development and encapsulate best practices in ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC. A huge new user guide and entirely new samples, packed with guidance not just on how to use LightSpeed but also on the best way to work with it in different environments. There is also a new metadata API, auditing capabilities and much much more.

Dynamic repositories with LightSpeed - taking dynamic up a level

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:01:32 GMT

Ready to think outside the box with the C# dynamic keyword? This post looks at taking the c# dynamic keyword and seeing how much boiler plate code we can get rid of. You'll learn how to take the Repository pattern where developers write a lot of GetFooByName, GetBarByEmailAddress type methods and how to get rid of them - gone, history, finished! Then there's Named Parameters - this post starts looking at how to use them for querying. By the end of this post you'll have a whole new way of looking at things with dyanmic and named parameters!

Mindscape releases WP7 control suite

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:56:19 GMT

Mindscape have released an extensive control suite for Windows Phone 7 developers. Included is a high performance charting suite of 14 chart types along with standard controls such as time pickers, date pickers, color pickers and much more. This post announces the release and provides a giveaway to get a free license.

Mindscape releases Free Silverlight controls

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:22:12 GMT

Mindscape has released three Silverlight controls free of charge for developers to work with! The Book control which allows for beautifully animated page turning, virtualized pages, pagination and custom content. Their Coveflow control for representing visual data in an elegant manner for end users and their Expander control for making it easier to free up valuable UI space by collapsing elements away. This post digs into the controls more and gives a link to download them now.

Json.NET 4.0 Release 1 - .NET 4 and Windows Phone support

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 02:08:21 GMT

By popular demand: Json.NET 4.0! This is the first Json.NET release to target .NET 4 and integrates the many new features added in the latest version of .NET

F# and first-class functions, part 4: doing heavy lifting

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:15:52 GMT

The 4th and final part in the first-class functions series, this post brings it all together and starts doing some serious work in F#! See how F# has made it easy for to use higher-order functions to solve a real world problem more concisely and more simply than in C# or Visual Basic.

Intro to F# part 2: First-class function, point-free style

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:55:32 GMT

In the previous instalment, we saw that F# provided composition operators to allow you to concisely build up anonymous functions without the overhead of lambda syntax. Occasionally, however, a function will be so amazingly useful that you actually want to give it a name so you can use it from more than one place. Part 2 discusses how to achieve this.

Regular expressions with MSBuild. Reading version numbers...

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 04:55:24 GMT

I show how I recently used the MSBuild community tasks and a regular expression to read version numbers out of the AssemblyInfo.cs file into MSBuild properties.

Mindscape releases LightSpeed 3.11 ORM

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:30:52 GMT

LightSpeed 3.11 brings significant new features - SQL CE 4.0 support, 2500% faster SimpleDB batched inserts, querying enhancements, mapping improvements and much more. This post covers the highlight features that are part of 3.11.

Mindscape releases Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:28:10 GMT

SharePoint 2010 includes support for querying SharePoint lists via LINQ - a super nice way of getting data out of SharePoint for developers. Unfortunately, building the LINQ classes and data context wasn't as easy as it could be. Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 is a Visual Studio 2010 integrated design surface for creating SharePoint models quickly and easily.

Mindscape releases NHibernate Designer for VS2010

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:00:52 GMT

Mindscape, developers of the LightSpeed ORM have released a visual designer for NHibernate users. Leveraging their years of developing a Visual Studio integrated model designer for LightSpeed, the NHibernate Designer means developers can quickly and easily start working with their NHibernate solutions. Supports full database synchronization, model first and data base first development models.

Mindscape releases version 3 of WPF control suite

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:07:24 GMT

WPF Elements 3.0 has been released and is the amalgamation of three products - WPF Elements 2, WPF Property Grid and 5 beautiful WPF Themes. New controls such as a scheduler, rich text toolbar, sliders, and many more have been included along with many new samples for developers to learn from. Grab WPF Elements 3.0 and build something awesome today!

Mindscape's ORM, LightSpeed 3.1 has been released

Thu, 27 May 2010 09:45:52 GMT

LightSpeed 3.1 has been released and includes VS2010 designer support along with a slew of many new capabilities - the ability to link models together across several model design files (no more huge messy models, logically group them across files), support for saved designer views, core support for Class table inheritance, T4 code generation support, and a whole heap more to help developers deliver faster.

Writing maintainable code - encapsulate what varies

Sat, 22 May 2010 03:23:35 GMT

How to use the object oriented software design principle "encapsulate what varies" to write maintainable, adaptable software.

Mindscape Silverlight Elements 1.1 released

Thu, 20 May 2010 07:56:50 GMT

Mindscape have released Silverlight Elements 1.1 - bringing the control suite up to 14 Silverlight controls that work with both Silverlight 3 and 4. Sliders, split buttons, outlook styled controls, updated themes, time pickers, range selectors and more join the existing line up of a Silverlight HTML Editor, Scheduler, Color pickers, coverflow control and more.

Mindscape releases VS2010 designer for LINQ to SharePoint 2010

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:54:16 GMT

SharePoint 2010 was released today and one great new feature is LINQ to SharePoint. Unfortunately, working with LINQ to SharePoint involves command line tools and XML configuration. Mindscape Visual Tools for SharePoint provides a VS2010 integrated designer to drag and drop and manage the objects you wish to query. This post talks about the features and offers the first 50 sign ups a FREE copy of the product.

Automatic Factories With Unity 2.0

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 03:58:37 GMT

Unity 2.0 comes with new features. But the feature i want to talk about is "Automatic Factory". This feature is useful when one class has a dependency in another but may not need to have the instance of dependency in the constructor. Or, just want to create the dependency in another time.

LightSpeed + LINQPad - perfect partners

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:45:04 GMT

Today Mindscape released a LINQPad driver for LightSpeed 3.0. This extends LINQPad and allows developers to run LINQ Queries against LightSpeed models which, in turn, allows querying against SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Amazon's SimpleDB, MySQL, SQLite, VistaDB and DB2!

Mercurial tutorial - by Joel Spolsky

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:30:00 GMT

Mercurial is a modern, open source, distributed version control system, and a compelling upgrade from older systems like Subversion. In this user-friendly, six-part tutorial, Joel Spolsky teaches you the key concepts.

JSON Performance in .NET with Binary Data (testing...)

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:00:32 GMT

Binary data and text file formats (JSON, XML) don't tend get along. To be included in JSON or XML binary data has to be encode into a text friendly format, generally base64, which creates overhead both in the time spent encoding/decoding binary, and the extra size of the text encoded data in the message. In our test we'll compare serializing a message with binary data using common .NET serialization methods and compare the result.

Large or asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET MVC

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:30:01 GMT

The challenge of uploading large files in ASP.NET through HTTP is not a new challenge. In addition to handling large files, users often request an experience that shows the progress of an upload as it occurs. When you have either or both of these requirements, or if you simply need direct control of a stream of file data uploaded from a browser, you invariably hit the wall. I set about solving the problem in an ASP.NET MVC-specific way.

Mindscape LightSpeed 3.0 - initial impressions

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:15:06 GMT

Over the past few days I've finally had some time to give LightSpeed 3.0 a bit of a test drive. Nothing extensive so far, but enough to get some initial impressions.

jQuery 1.4 Released!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:00:07 GMT

In celebration of jQuery's 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we're really quite proud of it.

Welcome to the new DotNetKicks

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:00:14 GMT

Welcome to the new DotNetKicks - Lots of improvements and even more on the way!

.NET Serialization Performance Comparison

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:00:01 GMT

Comparing the speed and output of the different serializers available in .NET with the latest version of Json.NET.