DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by ashmind

Do We Need Another Open ID Provider?

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:31:07 GMT

Microsoft recently announced that Windows Live ID will be an Open ID provider, but not an acceptor. Does this really do anything to further the Open ID movement?

Touchless - A webcam multi-touch SDK

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:01:02 GMT

That brings us to today, releasing Touchless to the world outside Microsoft, as a *FREE* *OPEN-SOURCE* SDK with a low barrier to entry for developers and users. Touchless makes developing multi-touch capable software easy, and the results can be enjoyed by anyone with a webcam (and some M&Ms :))! Touchless has come a long way, but its journey has just begun. I can imagine a variety of great directions to explore using Touchless. Perhaps support for the forthcoming Windows multi-touch API, video chat white-boarding, implementing mouse/game/hotkey/media control, and designing decked out Minority Report style file/media browsers.

Windows comming soon to Amazon EC2

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:01:15 GMT

This is big news! Amazon are to enable Windows Support on EC2. this will allow users to kick of Windows images for running SQL Servers, IIS instances and anything else (even HPC stuff) in the cloud! SWEET!

Sending Email in a Development Environment without an SMTP Server

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:46:02 GMT

Very handy... I'm forever looking this stuff up :-|

Comparing .NET DI (IoC) Frameworks, Part 2

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:46:03 GMT

A second part of popular IoC frameworks comparison.

NHibernate 2.0 is out

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:46:02 GMT

Directly from the blog of Ayende, NHibernate 2.0 is out!!

Bad advice on exceptions from Joel

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:46:02 GMT

Starting from some comments on my exception handling series of articles I run into a couple of blogs pointing to this post on joelonsoftware.com. I think this is the worst advice on exception handling I have ever read, sorry Joel. I know this is an old post, I know Joel is entitled to his own opinion and I know he has the right to write his code as he sees fit. But as an opinion leader he influences others.

Comparing .NET DI (IoC) Frameworks, Part 1

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:18:44 GMT

A first part of feature comparison between the most popular DI (IoC) Frameworks: Castle, Unity, Autofac, Ninject, StructureMap and Spring.Net.

JSON Serializers in .NET - not there yet

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:01:02 GMT

.NET Framework 3.5 provides a couple of choices for JSON Serialization and Deserialization. Find out how you can use them and also some of the problems that both of these tools impose.

13 reasons for UML's descent into darkness

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:01:03 GMT

UML lost the programmers. There is no doubt about it. in my mind. And when a software design technology loses the programmers it fades away no matter what the academia thinks. This happened because UML was pushed in a direction that most code writers don't like: it started to look a lot like bureaucratic paper work.

ASP.NET MVC UserControls Start to Finish

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:46:12 GMT

The ASP.NET MVC framework ships with a number of Visual Studio project and item templates to ease our development tasks. One of these templates is a UserControl built specifically for the MVC framework. We are going to walkthrough building a re-usable Header control that can be added to the top of related pages (in this specific case, this Control will be added to all Account pages).

Microsoft cracking down on community extensions

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:01:02 GMT

Microsoft released a tool called Microsoft Source Analyzer, or StyleCop. It analyzes source code for standards violations. It's a 1.0 release, so it doesn't do some things ... like have a published API for custom rules or MSBuild integration. So the community dug in and figured out how to do these things and now MS is firing off license-violation emails. Don't they get it? The community wants to use the product, but it's too limited ... these extensions help make it better.

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:16:05 GMT

Internal email from Bill Gates detailing his difficulties with Microsoft.com, Windows Update, and more.

OMeta#: Who? What? When? Where? Why?

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:16:03 GMT

Introducing a new open source project whose aim is to bring the OMeta language to .net.

ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:46:02 GMT

Over the past year, Microsoft and the Entity Framework team have received a tremendous amount of feedback from experts in entity-based applications and software architectures on the .NET platform. While Microsoft's announcement of its intention to provide framework support for entity architectures was received with enthusiasm, the Entity Framework itself has consistently proved to be cause for significant concern.

Comprehensive Comparson of 7 Popular JavaScript/Ajax Frameworks

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:16:02 GMT

After four days of ASP.NET AJAX training with Stephen Walther I set out to learn more about my options in choosing a solution for a JavaScript/Ajax framework. If I realized days later I would be writing this comprehensive post on 7 of the most popular frameworks, I may have just went with the "Inny-Minny-Miney-Moe" method! I decided to share my research, analysis, links, resources, and personal grade for each of the frameworks compared - jQuery, YUI, Prototype, Dojo, MooTools, Ext JS, and Script.aculo.us. I put together a comparison matrix to illustrate where many of the frameworks differ...

Why asp.net MVC is so awesome.

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:16:03 GMT

The number one reason why asp.net MVC is the best thing ever.

.NET 3.5 Brings BREAKING Changes to ThreadPool

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:31:02 GMT

Things get more interesting with the .NET 2.0 SP1 ThreadPool.

Does Your Code Pass "The Turkey Test?"

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:16:02 GMT

How careful are you about using the correct form of string and number formatting? How about your use of String.Compare and String.Equals?

Minority Report-like interaction with WPF

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:46:03 GMT

The guys at Cynergy built a very cool prototype of a no-touch interface using WPF and Wii controller. Here is a video and some insight of how they developed it.

Waterfall Doesn't Work

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:01:02 GMT

Waterfall Doesn't Work; All Non-Agile Projects Eventually Devolve into Necessary Sub-Standard Agile. The traditional life cycle approach effectively ignores these issues and developers have been forced to consider other methods to overcome these problems.

F# to become 1st class .NET language

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:01:02 GMT

F#, the functional programming language born from ML and incubated by Microsoft Research,, is ready for prime time. Full Visual Studio support, a commercial development team, official support, the whole bit. F# becomes the first functional language to get 1st class support on the CLR.

Another Vibrant Ink Theme for Visual Studio

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:16:02 GMT

Rob shows off his new version of the version of the Vibrant Ink theme for Visual Studio.

OSI Approves Microsoft License Submissions

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:16:02 GMT

The Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL).

Introducing SyncLINQ (Databinding with LINQ)

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:16:03 GMT

SyncLINQ is a set of extensions to LINQ that enable data binding over LINQ queries. SyncLINQ alters LINQ queries so that they return INotifyCollectionChanged collections, meaning that when the sources are updated, the result of the LINQ query is also updated.