DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by schalkvanwyk

Alternatives to Relational DBs - ESENT

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:06:21 GMT

ESENT is an extremely performant engine that is used by Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory (and probably other things, too). Ayende is using it to power DivanDB, a .NET document-oriented database.

Using Configurations to Manage SQL Server Extended Properties

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:56:50 GMT

Have you ever wanted to attach attributes to a SQL Server database without needing to maintain separate meta-data tables? For example, what if you wanted to version your database? Is there a way to do this without having to create and maintain your own tables? There is indeed a way, and the way is via extended properties.

InstallSite: Windows Installer Tools and Tips

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:16:37 GMT

Tips for working with windows installer MSI files

MSI Tips and Notes - Robert Dickau

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:16:25 GMT

Tips for working with windows installer MSI files

Debug support for arbitrary state-machines

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:22:22 GMT

Debugging and reflection.emit

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio - The Visual Studio Blog -

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:21:32 GMT

Enable unsupported msbuild debugging in VS

John Robbins' Blog : Window Clippings 3 Released

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:08:11 GMT

Create print screen clippings

Streaming with LINQ to XML - Part 2 - Microsoft XML Team's WebLog - Si

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:01:09 GMT

In today's world, developers have a somewhat unpleasant choice between doing this efficiently with fairly difficult APIs such as the XmlReader/XmlWriter or SAX, and doing this easily with DOM or XSLT and accepting a fairly steep performance penalty as documents get very large.

Pipes and filters: The IEnumerable appraoch - Ayende @ Rahien

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:34:41 GMT

Pipes are very common in computing. It is a very good way to turn a complex problem to a set of small problems. You are probably familiar with the pattern, even if not explicitly.

Things that Should be Easy: AnyCPU, x86, x64 - What's the Difference?

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:29:34 GMT

Why compiling dotNET assemblies with AnyCPU is not always the best.

InfoQ: Pulling Power: A New Software Lifespan

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:06:44 GMT

BDD - Feature Injection

Easier Complex IComparable Implementations

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:50:31 GMT

I know a lot of us are using the LINQ OrderBy() method to get our data shuffled in the right order, but on occasion I still do like implementing IComparable, especially when defining the default, intrinsic sort scheme for a particular class. What I don't like is implementing IComparable when I want to compare on more than one thing.

Monadic Parser Combinators using C# 3.0 - LukeH's WebLog - Site Home -

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:00:32 GMT

Parser combinators are an idea that I enjoy every time I go back and look at again. They are an approach to building parsers by composing very simple atomic parsers into bigger and bigger units which can ultimately express real world grammars. This idea has been particularly popular in functional languages where the parsers can naturally be thought of as functions from input strings to parse trees, and composition of parsers is just function composition. This approach often leads to a simple syntax which makes the resulting parsers pleasantly declarative in that internal-DSL kind of way.

Immutability in C# - Tales from the Evil Empire

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:40:26 GMT

For some reason, there's been a lot of buzz lately around immutability in C#. If you're interested in algorithms and data structures, it's a fascinating subject. Immutable objects, according to Patrick Smacchia, have the following advantages: They simplify multithreaded programming. They can be used as hashtable keys. They simplify state comparison.

Syntactic Sugar - Scopes

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 06:46:27 GMT

Have you ever had a scenario where you needed to temporarily change some value for the duration of an operation and then you wanted to change it back again when you were done? In the MVP application I've been working on there is a repeated scenario that the presenter needs to make the View appear busy while it performs a service call and then return the View to its original state when the service call completes.

The Ultimate Disposable

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 06:45:38 GMT

I'm very partial to safe code, so I really like the using() statement in C#. The problem with this statement, however, is that I want to do different things at different times, which require different disposing semantics from the same class.

Container-friendly domain events and disposable actions

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 06:43:47 GMT

A lot of times an operation on a single aggregate root needs to result in side effects that are outside the aggregate root boundary. There are several ways to accomplish this, such as: - A return parameter on the method - A collecting parameter - Domain events Contextual containers and disposable actions What I need to do is allow this static method to work with a contextual, scoped piece of code. But that's exactly what the "using" statement allows us to do - create a scoped piece of code, that executes something at the beginning (whatever creates the IDisposable) and something at the end (the Dispose method).

Securing a Web Site

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:35:04 GMT

A guid to securing a web site by Erik Evans.

Configuring WCF for NATs and Firewalls

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:15:33 GMT

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) transports and message exchange patterns react differently to the presence of NATs and firewalls. This document describes how NATs and firewalls function in common network topologies. Recommendations for specific combinations of WCF transports and message exchange patterns are given that help make your applications more robust to NATs and firewalls on the network.

X.509 Certificates in .NET

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:29:40 GMT

This tutorial explains all about X.509 certificates and its current formats and shows how it can be implemented in .NET environment.

Using Makecert to Create Certificates for Development

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:24:24 GMT

When I first needed to use certificates to secure my WCF service, I didn't really understand how certificates worked, how to create them, and where they go. A lot of the tutorials on the web just give you a raw makecert command that you black-box and trust works to create your certificate. But do you really know what it's doing?

Managing business object locks on application level

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:59:19 GMT

Today I worked out simple application side object locking solution for one server scenario. My motivation came from ASP.NET architecture forum thread How to solve concurrent site issue where one user asks for locking solution that works without changing database. Here is my simple and primitive solution that should help this guy out. I added also sample solution to this posting.

A Fast Dynamic Factory Using Reflection.Emit

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:07:49 GMT

In this post I'll show my implementation of the Factory Pattern build with C# using Generics, Delegates and Reflection.Emit.

The constructor conflict

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:04:27 GMT

Sometimes I'm wondering strange things. For instance, this morning I was wondering if a static constructor of a class can create an instance of itself. It seemed to me this would be a conflicting requirement, because a classes constructor will only run after it's static constructor has run.

ASP.NET Provider Model Template for Visual Studio

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:01:25 GMT

This article describes my Visual Studio 2005 / Visual Studio 2008 template for rolling your own custom provider on the ASP.NET 2.0 Provider model. The model is actually not restricted to ASP.NET and this template allows you to create your custom provider for every type of .NET application, including console and forms applications.