David Cooksey is a .Net developer and ScrumMaster for Thycotic Software in Washington, D.C. He loves tackling complex or obscure problems, especially if they involve a new domain language. His interests include Regular Expressions and FsLex/Yacc.
ClickOnce makes it easy to deploy WinForms applications. But while it has some versioning support, it has no built in way to deliver different versions to different people. This makes partial rollouts to a test audience difficult. David Cooksey shows how to fine grained versioning to a ClickOnce deployment using an HttpHandler written with ASP.NET.
PowerGUI brings PowerShell scripting support to Visual Studio. This extension by Quest Software leverages the PowerGUI standalone tool to provide syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, debugging and more for PowerShell scripts inside Visual Studio.
Cihan Biyikoglu introduced an upcoming feature for scalability in SQL Azure databases called Federations at Tech Ed 2011. Federations are objects inside the database which allow the data in their contained tables to be distributed across additional databases called federation members. Data can be re-distributed across Federation members at run-time.
Brad Olenick announced the new RIA/JS jQuery plugin at MIX11. This plugin wraps a RIA DomainService; adding events, change tracking, validation, and more. Brad’s presentation “Building Data-centric N-tier Applications with jQuery” demonstrates many of these features including shared validation, sorting, filtering, buffering, and change tracking.
Alan Berman recently explained the details of how the new Async and Await keywords impact the flow of control. Using these keywords allows an asynchronous function's return values to be processed without using explicitly defined callbacks. This allows for more natural code grouping, as calling and processing of an asynchronous function can occur in the same function.
A simple ORM used in StackOverflow titled Dapper.Net was recently released on code.google.com. This ORM specializes in fast generation of objects from SQL query results. Dapper.Net supports mapping query results to a strongly typed list or a list of dynamic objects. The ORM is a single file of less than 500 lines of C# code and is available under the Apache 2.0 License.
Steve Sanderson recently introduced MVC Scaffolding, a customizable code generation tool for ASP.NET MVC 3. MVC Scaffolding uses a simple command-line interface to automatically generate code based on templates. Standard templates allow for automated generation of many common elements, including Views, Actions, and Unit Test stubs.
Attribute Based Caching provides declarative method-level caching and cache invalidation for .NET applications. Attributes applied to a method specify how it should be cached with no additional code necessary.
MongoDB's new journaling feature improves reliability with write-ahead redo logs. Log entries are written before permanent storage is updated. When a server restarts after a crash outstanding journal files will be replayed before the server goes online. Other changes include sharding performance boosts, shell tab completion, and the addition of covering and sparse indexes.
