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I have recently started to look at the changes introduced with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1, the first thing I have looked at is Workflow Foundation 4.0. In this post I will create a simple example which illustrates a long running workflow which persists its state to SQL Server. The example scenario is as follows; a request ...

EMC Consulting / EMC Conchango are pleased to be co-hosting the AltNetConf UK the 1st weekend of August 2009. The event will be run over the entire weekend as follows: Altnet Beers - Fri 31st July @ Tequila Open Space Coding Day - Sat 1st August @ EMC Conchango Alt.Net UK Conference - Sun 2nd August @ EMC Conchango Due to demand the ...

On my current project I wanted to do a little pit stop after our 1st sprint to ensure that the solution was running as optimally as possible. We’ve fleshed out the solution structure and have pulled together all the core pieces of technology – so within Visual Studio, the solution looks like: Solution ‘MyApp’ +---Data |   ...

  My current project requires both e-commerce and content management features at the core of its solution. Whilst this would seem to be a fairly obvious and common requirement, the current offerings in the .Net world seem to be lacking when you try to consider both requirements. Sure, there are some great .Net CMS tools (Umbraco being my ...

After reading Jobi Joy’s post about a 3D Flip Control he had built. It gave me an idea about creating a Silverlight 3D Flip Action that can be applied to any UIElement. It also meant that I got to play with the new Plane Projection bits in SL 3.0. To do this sort of interaction in WPF I use a series of data templates that using template binding ...

Just recently I was doodling in Visual Studio, writing some .Net code (dangerous, I know). The stuff I was doing wasn’t particularly process intensive but it WAS data intensive; by that I mean I was looping over a collection of entities (let’s pretend that the entities were vehicles sales) and producing lots of statistics about those entities. For ...

When Linq was initially introduced, I thought it was one of the most useful additions that have ever been made to .NET. I still think that now but after working with Linq for a while I’ve come to the conclusion that it can introduce several problems: Queries are scattered all over the code base There is no common reusable query ...

I have been working on a Silverlight project, and the experience of using it for a period of several weeks on a real application has been quite good. I thought I would highlight three aspects that made it good. 1: It has real C# and .Net inside. The CLR used in Silverlight may be cut-down, but the developer experience isn't. We used Visual ...

Behaviors are new to Silverlight 3 and WPF. The main reason we now have Behaviors in Silverlight was due to the lack of support in Silverlight of triggers. Triggers in WPF are incredibly useful as they provide the ability to change the look and feel  of UI Elements dynamically based on the state of the application directly in the Xaml. In ...

I’ve come to the conclusion that mixing object creation logic (e.g. new statements) with business logic is a bad idea; this is because A method should only be responsible for one thing (Single Responsibility Principle), either it creates things or performs logic on things not both. Code littered with both creation logic and business logic ...