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Summary Upon deciding to start this series of blogs I decided that in order for me to consume the Blippr API I would attempt to “try” and make my life easy. I decided that the easiest way would be to start writing a LINQ to Blippr provider (first ever try) so that it was possible to easily consume the Blippr platform in any .NET application I ...

Introduction You never have to look to far these days when it comes to social media; it is not a new concept having been around for a while now. The explosion of social networking sites and application usage in recent years has been truly amazing. You will no doubt experience or touch social media in your day to day life whether you like it or ...

Earlier in the year when I was doing some research into writing my own LINQ Provider I stumbled across a great listing of LINQ Providers, two entries looked very interesting; the first was LINQ to RDF(Semantic Web), the second was LINQ to Excel. The latter caught my attention as it was a very simple implementation of a LINQ Provider, which ...

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 ...

As I mentioned in my last post I've been working with Microsoft Blueprints, one of the problems I encountered was trying to come up with a generic, reusable way of working with T4 Templates (T4 is the used by Blueprints for all code generation as T4  is now integrated into Visual Studio 2008) to generate the code fragments. I created ...

Introduction The data access wars are over; long live the ORM wars. The new battles are fought with even more fanatical zealous behaviour than in previous conflicts. Rather than just debating the pros and cons of how best to execute SQL and wire it into our objects, there is now a whole new dimension to developer’s polarized opinions; what is the ...

In the 1990s I coded on a few systems where the architecture was that we attached database functionality to our business objects, so you could do something like     someObject.Value = 4;   someObject.Save();   While this looks appealing, this pattern (I later learned that it is called active record) has fallen out of ...

What kind of thing is Language Integrated Query, exactly? You can draw the line in a number of places, but I am going to cut it down to the core, where LINQ is a Domain Specific Language.   There are LINQ-enabling language features, i.e the language extensions of type ...

I never really got that excited about Silverlight 1.0, mainly because whilst it had a great core graphics engine and did video streaming very well, it's feature set was just not rich enough to make it really useful to applications that demanded deep functionality. One of the features that was clearly lacking was connectivity; you could not ...

SQL Server 2008 is upon us and if there is one feature about which I am somewhat excited (sad geek, I know) is the plethora of new data types designed purely to store dates and times. To explain the reasons for this excitement let me just list the problems with existing SQL types. The first major issue is that of resolution: Smalldatetime has ...