Dev

My experience preparing for and gaining the TS Windows Communication Foundation Development 4 certification. The (~7 year old) WCF stack to my suprise, is much larger than I ever gave it credit for. 70-513 successfully pointed me toward a number of “off the beaten track” topics, so much so, that I actually quite enjoyed preparing for this exam. Lots of emphasis in the exam on topics such as routing, diagnostics, transactions, sessions and discovery. ...

The VS11 beta includes a really slick cheatsheet style F# language reference. A gem for groking F# syntax. The samples are grouped into modules. A module is just a collection of value, function and type definitions. To execute the code in F# Interactive, highlight a line of code and then either type Alt-Enter, or right-click and choose “Send to Interactive”. To start F# Interactive, see the “View” menu. For more about F#, see: http://fsharp.net ...

When its comes to managing and supporting WCF services, like any software, having insight into erroronous situtions is essential. There are several ways to go about this that are specific to WCF, such as enabling a trace listener for example. A more customisable option involves fleshing out an IErrorHandler. As put by MSDN, provides the necessary hooks to run custom error processing logic. Allows an implementer to control the fault message returned to the caller and optionally perform custom error processing such as logging. ...

Autofac (a .NET IoC container) makes .NET code better. Simple. Controlling the way software interacts with it’s components (dependencies) is one powerful way to the increase its “bendability”. Bendability meaning how well a chunk of software is able to cope with change (this is inevitable). WCF’s unique object model (bindings, endpoints, behaviors, contracts, etc) can make doing IoC more of a challenge, however Autofac’s native WCF integration comes to the rescue. ...

The SharePoint 2010 platform is dauntingly huge. Fortunately development certification 70-573 (Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development) sticks to the bread and butter fundamentals that is applicable to all forms of custom SharePoint development. For the purposes of 70-573 you can pick up things like FAST, Excel Services, Form Services, Performance Point and toss them out the window. Concepts like lists, libraries, web parts, and delegate controls is what SharePoint development is really about. ...

For various design reasons .NET 4.0 has it’s own GAC, located here. %systemroot%\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly An updated version 4.0 of gacutil is available as a part of the Windows SDK. Here is a handy VS.NET “Post-build event command”, that will .NET 4.0 GAC your freshly baked assemblies. "%programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe" /i "$(TargetPath)"

As a follow up to previous post [The Servlet API]({% post_url 2007-02-20-servlet-api %}), this post aims to sweeps over some fundamentals of JSP, a technology which thanks to its simple yet extensible design, still to this day, underpins many modern web application frameworks. JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology that helps software developers create dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types. Released in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. ...

As you start out building Java web applications, you soon find that it sit upon several well designed building blocks. Once the penny drops, and an intuition about these building blocks is gained, creating web apps on Java becomes a delight. Two key, top level concepts are the mighty Servlet API and JavaServer Pages (JSP). These are deployed to a Web container, also commonly referred to a Servlet (or Web) container. ...