ObjectSharp

I recall my first experience with Word 2007...it took me 20 minute to figure out how to do a Save As. Who would have figured that the cute icon in the top left corner actually had functionality associated with it. :) In a blog post from Chris Sells, I was point to a tool whose purpose is to bridge this gap. You see an on-line image of Office ...

Dare Obasanjo had an interesting post yesterday on the Second System Effect in software development. For those who are unaware, the second system effect is a term first coined by Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man Month. It deals with (in general) the idea that the second system designed/implemented by anyone is typically over-architected, with ...

This post is basically a reminder to a future me. The client I'm working with right now (basically an ISV) is using SQL Express as part of their project. And included in their database are a number of CLR stored procedures. In other words, the stored procedures are written in C#. While a little unusual, this is not particularly extraordinary. The ...

Recently, a question regarding the cost associated with migrating from VB6 to VB.NET was asked by one of our clients. Since that is a question whose answer has a broader appeal than just to the asker, I thought I would replicate my response here. It should be stated up front, however, that I don't normally recommend a migration from VB6 to .NET. ...

With all this heat, I almost wrote "perspiring". Why not beat the heat, and stay cool inside while watching these web casts from MS Canada targeting aspiring architects. With the predicted shortage in IT in the upcoming years, we're sure to see an influx of junior resources into our industry. This is a good opportunity for developers ...

Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way. I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday. To those ...

About a month ago, Live.com released an update to their search engine and I took it upon myself to write down my observations of Live as compared to Google. Although the features seemed to be a pretty good leap in many areas, I concluded that the only way to see which one was better was to change my default engine to Live.com for a week or two and ...

Are you a design & mac user in a Windows Development Shop? Are they eyeing your Mac and measuring your desk to outfit you with a new PC? Over your cold dead corpse I bet. No worries. You owe it to yourself to check out the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription.  Yeah, you could run Bootcamp but then you'd loose the OS X & ...

Well it's just 1 week since DevTeach came to Toronto for the first time. What a great conference and it was my pleasure to be involved as a speaker, track-chair and attendee. The conference organizer Jean-Rene Roy just sent me a note with some of the comments from the overall evaluations. If you didn't attend this year, here's some reasons why you ...

A quick heads up to let you know that VS 2008 Service Pack 1 is now available (links below). It typically takes a couple of months from this point before we'll see a final release. This Service Pack includes new cool feature: ADO.NET Entity Framework ADO.NET Data Services ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions (aka Cicero) which includes MVC Framework, ...