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 →
TFS Team Build: One area where TFS 2008 is not backward compatible…
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 →
My first look at developing Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1
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 →
Reference Types vs. Value Types
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 – Why, When and How
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 →
Guidance Packages for VS 2008
Guidance Packages are awesome, but they do have a way of driving me crazy sometimes. They have a new version of the Guidance Automation Extensions, which is basically the runtime or framework that plugs in to VS. The new version was updated to support VS 2005 and VS 2008. The documentation indicates that the installers... Continue Reading →
ESB vs. Event Driven Architecture (EDA)
I've learned about a new design pattern that is conceptually similar to an ESB. It's called an Event Driven Architecture or EDA. I like this term because it describes the pattern that I've been trying to implement here at IMC via our Service Bus implementations. I still think that an ESB is useful, but the... Continue Reading →
