InfoQ Homepage .NET Content on InfoQ
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SQL Azure Database Scalability with Federations
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.
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Adding Scale to ASP.NET Applications in the Cloud
Microsoft presented several options for scaling ASP.NET applications hosted on Windows Azure. There are a number of services for caching, traffic distribution, asynchronous work processing, and storage, and these options can be used in combination to scale applications up or down.
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Multi-casting Messages to Twitter, Jabber, IRC, etc. with .NET and Ruby
Customers use a wide variety of technologies for communication and expect the companies they deal with to do the same. This means the same message may need to be sent to a mailing list, a Twitter account, an IRC channel, and a Facebook page. To make this easier, developers can use the Broadcast library for Ruby or its .NET clone, nBroadcast.
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PetaPoco: Micro ORM For .NET
PetaPoco is a thin Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for .NET applications. Unlike full-fledged ORMs like NHibernate or Entity Framework, the emphasis is on simplicity of use and performance rather than richness of features. PetaPoco comes in a single C# file, works with strongly typed POCOs, supports class generation with T4 templates and more.
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Sending Richly Formatted Emails with .NET
Richly formatted emails can require quite a bit of CSS, but since email clients don’t always handle CSS well the styles need to be inlined. With Ruby this is easily handled with the Alex Dunae’s Premailer library, but calling it from .NET isn’t palatable to most developers. So Martin H. Normark built a .NET version called PreMailer.NET.
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Introducing the MVC Mini Profiler from Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange has released the ASP.NET MVC profiler that is used by Stack Overflow and its sister sites. MVC Mini Profiler is an internal profiler specially designed to support database-backed websites.
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Debugger Canvas Brings Code Bubbles To Visual Studio
Developers can finally get their hands on the Debugger Canvas, a new Power Tool for Visual Studio that gives Code Bubbles like experience for navigating contextual code snippets. It displays the code of each of the methods you step into on a canvas with call lines between them, helping to keep track of the bigger picture as well as the details.
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A New Library and Tooling Package for Open XML
Open XML SDK 2.0 offers a moderately high level API for manipulating Open XML documents using strongly typed classes. It includes the Open XML SDK v2.0 Productivity Tool, which can reverse engineer a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document and display the C# code needed to recreate it.
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Visual Studio Gets Better Support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
Following Microsoft’s announcement that Windows 8’ UI will be based on HTML5 and JavaScript, it is no surprise that Visual Studio 2010 has got an update polishing its HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 support: up-to-date W3C-based intellisense and validation for HTML5 and CSS3, plus Geolocation and DOM storage intellisense.
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SQL Server Denali: Microsoft Wants Your Feedback on Upgrade Paths and Supported Operating Systems
Microsoft posted the proposed list of SQL Server Code Name Denali upgrade paths and operating systems, and is soliciting feedback on their selections. Windows XP and 2003 are excluded, and versions of SQL Server may require service pack updates before a new Denali installation.
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.NET Micro Framework now supports Visual Basic, Remote Software Updates
The open source platform for embedded devices, .NET Micro Framework, has begun beta testing of version 4.2. This build includes the work of both Microsoft and third-party developers, something that is becoming increasingly common as Microsoft redefines its role in the open source community.
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C++ AMP Provides Massive Parallelism
Microsoft wants to give C++ developers tools for writing parallel applications running on zillions of GPUs/cores locally or in the cloud.
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Explaining .NET’s Barrier Class
With the increased emphasis on multi-core systems an understanding of parallel and concurrent programming is more important than ever. Fortunately .NET 4 has made a lot of advances in the types of synchronization primitives available to developers. One such primitive is the Barrier, which Emad Omara uses to implement a parallel merge sort.
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Update to .NET Framework 4
A General Distribution Release of .NET 4 was published on the 11th of June. This includes numerous fixes and features, many of which were previously published as individual hot fixes. There are also updates to the HTML 5 and portable library support. For your convenience we have sorted the fix list by technology. For the complete list, including file versions, see KB 2468871.
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Windows Azure AppFabric CTP - Queues and Topics
The Azure team recently shipped a Community Preview (CTP) for AppFabric, with Service Bus Queues and Service Bus Topics, which can be leveraged in a whole new set of scenarios to build Occasionally Connected or Distributed Systems.