Microsoft is continuing to broaden the pool of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) testers beyond the fairly small, select group who’ve been working with test builds for the past few months.

Something was brought to my attention which, to say the least, left me a little baffled: IE 6 is coming to mobile phones...

Full source code to get Flight Information from Kayak.com through their API

The basic concepts will be retained but the implementation and all components will change fundamentally. It will be shiped with .Net 4.0 and will not be compatible with current Workflow Foundation Code.

A LinkButton in a GridView and my attempt to change the "Text" property of the control !

Tried TDD and abandoned it the moment you've tried it on 'real' code? Learn how to tackle these 'hard-to-test' areas, that those presentations and introductory books just don't seem to explain well.

One on the Mac, and one on the PC. First, the Mac.

Blue Ocean Strategy is book that presents a series of proven practices that help making companies so successful that their competitors become practically irrelevant. This book can provide great insight, whether you dream of building the next Google or Apple-like company, or you just want to understand how companies like that became so successful.

Many people are confused about SQL Server’s precision and scale. This is unfortunate because choosing the correct values for precision and scale is critically important when you perform math operations using the decimal/numeric data type

A way to think of the CLR thread pool and how it gets used, e.g. when you call ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem, is to picture a global queue where work items (essentially delegates) get queued on a global queue and multiple threads pick them out in a First In First Out order. The FIFO order is not something that is documented or guaranteed, but my personal guess is that too many applications rely on it, so I don’t see it changing any time soon.

The flyweight pattern is a design pattern that is used to minimise resource usage when working with very large numbers of objects. When creating many thousands of identical objects, stateless flyweights can lower the memory used to a manageable level.

One of the new tools that showed up in Visual Studio 2005 that I don’t see many people taking much advantage of is the Class Diagram. The class diagram displays the classes you drag onto it in a visual representation much like a UML class diagram does.

A getting-started guide to dependency inversion, and a illustration and comparison of the use of StructureMap and Unity containers.

This post is about disk space and the disk space “consumed” by Windows 7. Disk space is the sort of thing where everyone wants to use less, but the cost of using a bit more relative to the benefits has generally been a positive tradeoff. Things have changed recently with the availability of solid-state drives in capacities significantly smaller than the trend in spinning drives. Traditionally most all software, including Windows, would not hesitate to consume a 100MB on a specific (justified) need when looking at a 60GB (or 1,500GB) drive; with desirable machines shipping with 16GB of solid-state storage, we are looking carefully at the disk space used by Windows—both at setup time and also as a PC “ages”. We also had a specific session at WinHEC on solid-state drives that might be interesting to folks.

MooTools cohort Jim Wilson sends me this wonderful little nugget of entertainment today. Microsoft’s SharePoint app has in it’s web app code this lovely little bit of JavaScript:

What the heck is WCF? For a long time, I couldn't tell you exactly what it was. And honestly, I still don't think I can. WCF is such a broad concept that it's hard to boil down into a concise explanation. When I finally started reading about it, and getting beyond the concepts, things started to clear up. That's what today's tutorial is about - cutting through all the concepts and just use WCF to build a basic server and a basic client.

The reason using jQuery in HTAs is so interesting to me is that one of the main constraints of using JavaScript in web pages (that being the amount of data that has to be transferred from the server to the client) has been lifted. With your web pages you are always concerned with the amount of data that is being sent to the client causing a slow rendering. With HTAs you don't have this issue. The JavaScript and Plugins can be saved locally and included in a support folder for quick loading into your HTA.

Here are the differences between C# .NET const, readonly and static readonly fields.

For the last month, I was working on an imagery infrastructure library. Some of my effort was to well document each class, method and property so that the users of this library will have the privilege of knowing how to properly use it. During the development phase, I created a test project so I will be able to test my code at runtime. By the end of this month, I decided to separate the test project from the main solution and create a test solution. Surprisingly, when browsing the test code and hovering my library classes and methods, no comments appeared in the Visual Studio tooltip. In In this article, I am going to explain why it is so important to generate XML documentation file for each one of your .Net projects.

An Adobe partner have announced a new plug-in allowing .NET developers to develop Flex applications from within Visual Studio

Sooner or later everyone needs to mess up with batch file Voodoo for some reason

Re-applying CSS to the DOM with IE6

Ryan plugs his Gravatar library into MVC in order to create a HTML view helper for building gravatar images.

Today IIS team has made the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Release To Web (RTW) available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is officially supported by Microsoft.

You may have already read Justin Van Patten's post about the upcoming breaking changes to the String class for .NET 4.0. This change will affect the behavior of the String.StartsWith, String.EndsWith, String.IndexOf and String.LastIndexOf methods by changing them to perform an ordinal (byte-for-byte) comparison by default instead of a culture-sensitive comparison using CultureInfo.CurrentCulture. In addition, the default overloads of String.ToUpper, String.ToLower, Char.ToUpper and Char.ToLower will be changed to use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture instead of CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.