New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP
John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.
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Posted by Minh T. Nguyen on Jun 08, 2006

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks explains how to use VS.NET efficiently. Organized into short and easy-to-grasp sections, and containing tips and tricks on everything from editing and compiling to debugging and navigating within the VS.NET IDE, this book is a must-read for all .NET developers, regardless of expertise and whether they program in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. This book covers the Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005 Beta 1 releases.
In this book you'll find the following:
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Chapter 1: Editing Code
Programmers perform a variety of daily tasks: We attend team meetings, design and test our programs, write documentation, and perform code reviews. But writing code is one task that awaits every programmer. If you love to code, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is perfect for you because it offers many ways to help you write and edit code. This chapter covers some of the tips and tricks you can use to write and navigate through your code much more quickly than before. From code comments and code navigation to generating code snippets and performing complex find-and-replace searches, this chapter covers all you need to know while you write code.
Chapter 2: Exploring the IDE
Visual Studio .NET is an extremely customizable IDE that is loaded with features. No screen real estate is wasted to give you quick access to commonly used commands and activities and to control and modify your project and solutions. The tips in this chapter cover everything from the Solution Explorer to window positioning, from managing macros and modifying menu items to other lesser-known tricks that are highly useful in navigating inside the IDE.
Chapter 3: Compiling, Debugging, and Deploying
Not only is VS.NET a great editor, it is also a great compiler, debugger, and profiler. There are many hooks into VS.NET that allow you to control your compilation procedure. The following are absolutely essential in trying to locate and fix a bug: analyzing your code, attaching to running processes that you want to debug, and changing code and variables at runtime. These are just a few topics I cover in this chapter that you need to know when it comes to compiling and debugging your programs.
Chapter 4: Using VS.NET 2005
VS.NET 2005 is an enormous improvement over VS.NET 2002 and 2003. Microsoft made an amazing tool even better. The jump to VS.NET 2005 is so big compared to the jump from VS.NET 2002 to 2003 that it requires a chapter of its own. This chapter concentrates on all the new tips and tricks not found in previous versions. This does not mean that the first three chapters are not applicable to VS.NET 2005 anymore. In fact, most of them still work or have been greatly improved (unless otherwise noted).
This chapter does not cover version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and its new classes and syntax additions. Naturally, VS.NET 2005 is tied very much to version 2.0 of .NET, and occasionally I dive into version 2.0–specific code, but this is only done to demonstrate a new IDE feature. Whenever I simply refer to VS.NET in this chapter, I naturally mean VS.NET 2005.
This book is based on VS.NET 2005 Beta 1. The final version of VS.NET 2005 might differ slightly from how I describe it in this chapter.
Chapter 5: Other .NET Tips and Tricks
This chapter contains tips and tricks related specifically to .NET. Many of them are not related to VS.NET per se. However, I decided to include them in this book because they apply to most VS.NET developers. Developers who are new to .NET might not be familiar with some of these tips and tricks.
At the time of writing this book, Minh T. Nguyen was a website development engineer with Expedia.com. He has worked with Visual Studio .NET since its beta stages and regularly gives workshops and writes articles for the .NET community. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and currently works in Silicon Valley as a software design engineer in the Microsoft TV division.
John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.
Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.
Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.
Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).
Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.
Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.
One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.
InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.