While the task to keep current is daunting, there are some things you can do to keep fresh, and balance your skill set. Here’s a brainstorm on ideas to help you keep current : Take some online courses in areas where you have interest. There are some very helpful and free solutions for Dot Net developers at MSDN. I have […]

Being an IT professional is like the coyote character in a Warner Brothers Road Runner Cartoon. For those of you not familiar with the cartoon, there are two characters. There is the Road Runner, a ground bound bird that runs incredibly fast. The second character is the coyote, a hungry animal, constantly racing after the Road Runner, hoping to capture […]

Desinging a database from scratch can be a daunting process.If you get it wrong it results in a lot of extra work. There are many options that are not necessarily wrong, but also create extra work downstream. When you are starting from scratch the easiest way to get things going is to identify the entities pertaining to your database. An […]

One of the features of SQL that makes it very attractive is the interactive capabilities for writing queries. Many of us use SQL to write a quick query to ask a question. Based on the results, we write another query, or enhance the query just executed. This process continues until we find the results we need, or have to take […]

The MVC (Model/View/Controller) pattern has been popular with programmers for over a decade. What’s really cool about it is the continuing growth of techniques targeted at implementing MVC. One of the things I think makes it so powerful is that you can fulfill the pattern in many layers. With HTML5 implementations in browsers, it is easier than ever to implement […]

As most of us know, not all Cloud platforms are alike. You can be one of multiple installations sharing a service as co-tenant (software as a service). You may be purchasing Infrastructure as a Service, having full capacity of your installation. Even then, you most likely do not have sole access to a server; more likely you have a virtual […]

In keeping with the idea that Simple is better, today I share a comment from our reader, using the handle meilenberger62, simplifying the EF implementation published in yesterday’s editorial. Our reader alters my implementation code down as follows: Your example seems to works fine. I don’t believe you need to add all that code to create the relationships. If you […]

Entity Framework (EF) handles Many to Many relationships rather elegantly. However, if you need more control, wish to use something other than the default table name, or need to store additional properties in a Many to Many join, there is a little more work than what comes out of the box. Today I am sharing an example of one solution […]

When using any ORM generator, they tend to be quite useful, until… As you may know, an ORM generator is a software tool used to generate repeatable code patterns used to convert software object into relational structures, primarily pointing to SQL relational data stores. When you write your own ORM you quickly find you are writing the same code over […]

Returning to my topic of Entity Framework, today I want to compare the Decoration technique of defining classes as discussed yesterday with the fluent syntax technique. Classes used to communicate with tables through Entity Framework may be more fully defined using fluent syntax in a Model Builder than with decorations. Using fluid syntax you can define all of the options […]