DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by JudahGabriel

Visual Studio Achievements, now a reality!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:13:24 GMT

Follow up to last year's comic story on Visual Studio having game-like achievements.

How To Build a Modern Website in 2011

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:10:43 GMT

Over the past 12 months I've been on a self-imposed quest for knowledge. We're at a changing - almost revolutionary - point with the web as I (start) writing this on November 1st, 2011. Here's why

UX Guidelines for Metro-Style Apps

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:37:28 GMT

The Windows team has released official design guidelines for building Windows Metro style applications. These guidelines cover all the new UI elements, animations, and how they should work and fit together.

The Sick, Sad State of Windows Apps

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:27:11 GMT

People are afraid to install Windows apps. Windows app development is becoming irrelevant. Here's why, and how to fix it in Windows 8.

Silverlight's Broken Promise

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:24:33 GMT

This blogger talks about the future problems Silverlight developers might run into. Especially those who invested in the cross-platform functionality that Silverlight promised. Will Windows 8, Metro Style Apps, and IE 10 be the end of Silverlight?

Real-time UI Syncing with ASP.NET, SignalR, Knockout.js, and EF

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:36:07 GMT

Anoop Madhusudanan shows off his KsigDo to-do example application leveraging ASP.NET, SignalR, Knockout.js, and Entity Framework to provide real-time UI view-model syncing.

What is new in .Net framework 4.5?

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:20:34 GMT

The post has all the new features in .Net framework 4.5 in a single poster. What is nice about the poster is that it marks the feature as a significant improvement, a performance improvement, asynchronous improvement wherever applicable. It is definitely nice poster to zoom and print.

The bell tolls for Flash, and Silverlight isn't far behind

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:25:41 GMT

Flash and Silverlight developers: now is the time to reinvest your skills in another platform. The Great Browser Plugin War of the 21st century has come to a close, and the plugins have lost. Long live HTML5.

Embedding RavenDB into an ASP.NET MVC 3 Application

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:40:20 GMT

Learn how to use the embedded version of RavenDB in an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application.

Rendering PDFs with pdf.js using HTML5 and JavaScript

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:26:01 GMT

A couple of clever guys over at Mozilla have thought about this and have come up with a genius way of displaying PDFs inside your browser using Javascript and HTML5. The code is available for download on Github. PDF.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla Labs which means its good news for us as developers. In the long run this plugin is intended to render PDFs natively within Firefox itself and will eventually ship with Firefox. For now though, we can start using the power of this plugin within our applications today.

Rx release

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 04:46:33 GMT

Rx was started as in process technology, but with the addition of the IQbservable (the Rx complementary of IQueryable), Rx is breaking the process boundary.

Building a Pandora clone in Silverlight 4

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:33:01 GMT

Shows how to build a clone of the popular music site Pandora using Silverlight 4.

Finding memory leaks in managed code

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 21:52:05 GMT

A week or so ago, I got a call from a client who had some issues with an application that I had built. The application is a WPF 4 "media player" that is supposed to runs 24/7. The issue they were facing was that it only ran for about 12 hours before crashing.

Debugging with Async in C# 5.0

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:50:31 GMT

There is very small support for Debugging with Async. Lets explain a few facts on this note.

Understanding Navigation on Windows Phone 7

Thu, 13 May 2010 15:00:52 GMT

Taking a look at the Windows Phone 7 Api and understanding how to navigate between pages. In this episode we are going to focus on learning about the various ways you can navigate from page to page within your application. Because WP7 is based off of Silverlight 3.x you are able to utilize all the native silverlight navigation techniques such as static routing (hard wiring the .xaml path), using routes and using the NavigationService.

Multi-Touch in WPF and Silverlight

Tue, 18 May 2010 03:00:52 GMT

We had a great time at the Columbia Code Camp this year. A lot of great speakers and volunteers to help with the event. We had I think around 150 people show up which was amazing since it was snowing, raining and freezing temperatures . I did my multi-touch presentation for the first time and I think it went very well. Had some great feedback and questions afterwards. So as promised I am posting up the materials and a quick explanation of what is available to use for Multi-Touch in WPF and Silverlight.

IQueryable Can Kill Your Dog, Steal Your Wife, Kill Your Will To Live,

Wed, 12 May 2010 19:30:52 GMT

If you take a quick detour over to StackOverflow, you'll realize very, very quickly that, when it comes to wholly and full-heartedly screwing up your Linq to SQL statements, the screw-up almost always involves a misunderstanding of the purpose and...

Getting Started with LINQ

Thu, 06 May 2010 15:00:52 GMT

In this we'll continue to discuss how to go about the SQL Server Data Access using various technologies. This post will discuss Microsoft Language Integrated Query, otherwise known as LINQ. I will discuss how it can be used to accomplish the same tasks we have discussed in previous posts. But before that it surely requires a good introduction to start with. LINQ was introduced with .net 3.0 as one of the language enhancements. It uses generics, which was introduced in .net 2.0, thoroughly to accomplish what it was designed to do. LINQ is designed to query virtually any kind of data source which implements IEnumerable<T> interface. It allows you to query the data by emulating the SQL query expressions using any .net language you are comfortable with. Isn't that amazing!!

Simple Databinding and 3-D Features using Silverlight in Windows Phone

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:45:52 GMT

Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is the upcoming next generation Mobile Operating System by Microsoft. Amongst the many features, one of the nice features is that it has support for Silverlight. So most of the new features like 3-D, Databinding etc. are now available on WP7. In this article I will explain the basic Databinding as well as 3-D feature on Windows Phone 7.

Say Goodbye to NAnt and MSBuild With IronRuby

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:45:52 GMT

Tired of writing tons of XML in order to create automated .NET builds? Well, look no further... IronRuby, Rake, and Albacore are here to rescue you!

No-SQL - MongoDB - From introduction to high level usage in C#

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:45:52 GMT

A good introduction to using MongoDB from C#

Moles: Mocking the Un-Mockable

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Taking at how to use Pex/Moles for .Net. Unit testing is great, but most free isolation frameworks require that your mocks implement an interface. But what do you do when the class you are trying to mock is static or sealed with no interface. If you can't modify the class then your unit testing efforts are usually stuck. Moles, the new free isolation framework from Microsoft, supports mocking almost any CLR based class (including sealed and static classes)

Hidden C# feature - string.Format Width

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 16:15:00 GMT

Hidden C# feature string.Format width

Parallel Tasks in .NET 4.0

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:45:00 GMT

The Parallel class found in the System.Threading.Tasks namespace "provides library-based data parallel replacements for common operations such as for loops, for each loops, and execution of a set of statements". In this article, we will use the Invoke method of the Parallel class to call multiple methods, possibly in parallel.

Hello World, I am Win Phone 7

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:00:03 GMT

Take a first look at Windows Phone 7 Development. We will walk through creating a simple hello world application as well as give a quick tour of how to use the emulator.