DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by bert

Polyglot programming - combining functional, dynamic and imperative la

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:54:28 GMT

A blog post from Mindscape about the development experience of creating the Web Workbench product for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript in Visual Studio 2010. Like most .NET projects, it contains a fair chunk of C#. But quite a bit of the core is written in F#, and it also invokes a large amount of external Ruby and JavaScript code. While using all these languages definitely made it far easier to develop the product, it did also throw up a few challenges and surprises. This post looks at those challenges and surprises.

Sass, Less and CoffeeScript for Visual Studio 2010

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 08:39:32 GMT

Mindscape have released a 100% free Visual Studio extension that adds support for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript. Making this extension even more powerful is that it includes syntax highlighting, output generation, intellisense, go to definition and much more! Be up and running in with these technologies in Visual Studio in no time!

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.

5 features you didn't know existed in the LightSpeed ORM Designer

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 03:05:30 GMT

The LightSpeed Designer is the most powerful domain modelling surface for Visual Studio but that sometimes means users don't uncover some of the goodies baked into it. This post takes a look at 5 often overlooked features of the designer that can make .NET development easier and more enjoyable.

Efficient entity data loading with named aggregates

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 04:09:33 GMT

Controlling when and how much data is loaded is something developers have to keep in mind when building any modern data driven application. This blog post looks at an advanced feature in LightSpeed that helps hand the power back to developers: named aggregates. Dive deep into how you can make your applications blazingly fast!

Migrating a standard ASP.NET Website to N2CMS on EC2

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 03:56:31 GMT

This post reviews a recent site migration that Mindscape undertook - moving from a standard ASP.NET solution to the great N2CMS open source CMS using ASP.NET MVC. It looks at the challenges and solutions that were found as part of the migration to make it smooth and improve site performance for website visitors.

Charts, books and free controls - Mindscape Silverlight Elements 2.0

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:20:34 GMT

Mindscape have upgraded Silverlight Elements with a stunning charting library for line of business applications. A unique feature of the charting library is its special support for huge data sets. The suite contains over 30 controls including three new controls that have been released free. Plus, for a limited time, all new customers get a free copy of "Silverlight 4.0 Unleashed"!

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.

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.

NHibernate Designer updated with refactoring support

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:42:44 GMT

Mindscape have released a new version of the NHibernate Designer that was released earlier this week. Now including new refactorings, arrange support and improved keyboard user experience as requested by users of the NHibernate Designer.

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.

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.

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!

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.

The dynamic duo: LightSpeed & Azure

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:58:17 GMT

Describes how LightSpeed and the Windows Azure platform work happily together with details on running LightSpeed based web/worker roles with the Azure partial trust policy.

.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.

Mindscape LightSpeed 3.0 - Advocating a Commercial ORM

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:30:04 GMT

Compares the features of Mindscape's LightSpeed 3.0 ORM with those of LINQ to SQL and NHibernate.

Mindscape WPF Themes released

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:45:00 GMT

Mindscape have released a suite of WPF themes to help developers deliver attractive applications faster than ever before. All source code is included so that UI tweaks can be made to create your own style or leave them as they are to have an Office 2007 style or Expression Blend look and feel.

Desktop application design tips when using an O/R Mapper

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:45:01 GMT

Blog post including tips about how to make the development of desktop application easier when using an O/R Mapper

Custom functions in LINQ made easy with LightSpeed

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:15:00 GMT

Using LINQ to express queries is a great thing for .NET developers however sometimes it gets a bit tight when you want to express a database specific function that has no LINQ equivalent. This post shows how developers can easily create and express custom database functions so that their LINQ queries are executed completely by the database engine.

Windows 7 Code Pack v 1.0 Released

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:45:06 GMT

The Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework provides support for various features of Windows 7 and previous releases of that operating system. The Code Pack has reached version 1.0 and has been published on Code Gallery:

Enable LINQ in your .NET 2.0 application

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:12:21 GMT

Simple steps on how to bring LINQ to a .NET 2.0 only application.