Rather than write this stuff myself, I've included a couple of good articles that get through the concepts quickly and easily. Why should you care about XML Namespaces? XML is everywhere, even if you don't work directly with it. As IMC moves more to web services, our systems are sending more and more XML over... Continue Reading →

For the most part, Microsoft did a very nice job of making TFS 2005 stuff work with TFS 2008 and vice-versa. There's one area that just isn't compatible: Team Build. This is a bit of a sticky issue. Let's take our planned approach here: Upgrade some people to VS 2008. They start writing apps with... Continue Reading →

Last night, I got my first look at the Silverlight 2.0 (beta1) development experience. I downloaded and installed the Silverlight tools for VS 2008 and dove right in. Overall, I'm very impressed with Silverlight. I read through the first bit of the help files to learn the architecture and basic concepts. For the most part... Continue Reading →

Remember the C++ pointer stuff that you learned back in school? Messy stuff! Thank goodness for .NET where we don't have to worry about pointers and references, right? Wrong! It's still important to understand what kind of object you're working with. In some cases, your variable is really a pointer. In other cases, the variable... Continue Reading →

Caching is a very beneficial practice for improving application performance and efficiency. Conceptually, it is simple. However, there are a number of issues to take into account when caching data. I'd encourage you to read up on caching before you start using it though. As with all things, there are tradeoffs and challenges involved. So,... Continue Reading →