As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been talking about Ruby and Ruby on Rails more recently. It’s often good to get outside your comfort zone and see how other (web) developers live. One of the areas where Ruby really excels is the wealth of innovative testing/spec’ing libraries available. When writing tests/specs, we need […]
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Once upon a time there were four friends – two TextBoxes and two ComboBoxes. They all lived happily on a WPF Window bound together in blissful MVVM harmony. The TextBoxes were bound to the ViewModel’s TextBoxText property and the ComboBoxes to the ComboBoxSelectedItem property. <Window x:Class="MvvmComboBox.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mvvm="clr-namespace:MvvmComboBox" Title="MVVM ComboBox" Width="300" Height="150"> <Window.Resources> <mvvm:MainWindowViewModel […]
System.Type and XML are the nuts and gum of the development world. You can stuff a System.Type into an XML file, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Sometimes you don’t have much choice. For example: Custom configuration sections in App.config/Web.config Handlers and modules in Web.config ProxyFactoryFactory, 2nd-level cache provider, database dialect, and […]
[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.] Nothing gets an OO zealot hot under the collar the way the term polymorphism does. You probably have three questions right now… What does polymorphism have to do with object-relational mapping? How does it relate to NHibernate? And why should I care? An ORM that supports […]
We’ve all done it at one point or another. Our application throws an exception and we start wading through a standard Windows error dialog or a log file to examine the exception and stack trace. If you’re a ReSharper Jedi, you’ve probably copied the exception and stack trace to the clipboard and hit CTRL-SHIFT-E (IDEA) […]
[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.] In this post, we’ll examine the ways that NHibernate supports the DateTime-related data types, including some new features introduced in NHibernate 2 and 3. Here is a quick summary for the impatient. DbType .NET SQL Type DateTime System.DateTime datetime LocalDateTime System.DateTime datetime UtcDateTime System.DateTime datetime DateTimeOffset […]
[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.] One of the new features in NHibernate 3 is the addition of a fluent API for configuring NHibernate through code. Fluent NHibernate has provided a fluent configuration API for awhile, but now we have an option built into NHibernate itself. (Personally I prefer the new Loquacious […]
Thanks to everyone who came out to my session on Convention-over-Configuration on the Web at TechDays Calgary 2010. I enjoyed sharing my ideas about convention-over-configuration and how it can simplify software development. You expend some serious brain power over figuring out how to enable your application-specific conventions, but everything after that flows easily and without […]
DevTeach is heading back to Toronto in a few weeks (March 8-12, 2010)and you’ll get a bigger dose of awesome than ever before. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of top-notch, internationally renowned speakers. 6 tracks covering Agile, Web, Windows, Silverlight, Architecture, and SharePoint. A metric ton of sessions. (I’m both the Agile and Web Track […]
A few months back, I announced that I was doing a series of articles for MSDN Magazine on improving a “classic” ASP.NET application with modern tooling and frameworks. As an application, I chose ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0 to use as my example throughout. The first article, Extreme ASP.NET Makeover – Getting Your House in Order, went […]
