(Kevin Hoffman) I reailze that the Entity Framework is designed very specifically to serve as a queryable model that fronts a back-end database. The issue I have with that is that the back-end database is not always immediately accessible to my web application. In fact, sometimes, the back-end datab

(Donnie Hale) If you develop software long enough, you’ll inevitably run into bugs in your platform or framework of choice. It’s important on those occasions that you know how to apply the tools at your disposal to clarify the source of the bug; reproduce it in a deterministic fashion; and either fi

(Tess Fernandez) I have talked about blocked finalizers before and this issue is a special case of blocked finalizers where we are not really finalizing a .NET object but rather cleaning up all Com Callable Wrappers (CCWs) and getting stuck doing that.

(Jay Miller) Occasionally, I run across the need to see whether a string holds a valid enumeration value. I prefer to not add comparisons to specific string values when I already have an enumeration with all possible valid values. The solution is to try to convert the string into an enumeration valu

(Keyvan Nayyeri) In the first part of this article series about ASP.NET MVC Framework, I gave a short introduction to Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, ASP.NET MVC and the basic structure of the sample blogging engine that I am going to build in this article series and have named it KBlog.

(Shawn Burke) When you debug code in the .NET Framework using the newly available Reference Source functionality in VS 2008, you may notice that many variables are not available for inspection.

(Tony Patton) Unit testing has evolved from a fringe activity to an industry-accepted way to develop software. This change in attitude was aided by the introduction of numerous freely available testing frameworks — most notably, NUnit.

(Jani Järvinen) Many applications developed for the corporate world deals with SQL databases, and proper transaction handling is a central requirement for performance and robust data storage. When you are using C# to access data in Microsoft SQL Server databases, you are using transactions either im

(David Hayden) I had the absolute joy of hanging out at the Tampa .NET Developer Group Meeting last night. Here is a tip I mentioned briefly at the meeting around resolving and optmizing namespaces.

(Satheesh Babu) Displaying tabular data to the users is one of the common tasks we will perform in any site we build. In ASP.NET 1.x we make use of the DataGrid, DataList and Repeater controls most of the time depending on the need. With the introduction ASP.NET 2.0, we have GridView in the place of