Laila Lotfi

Laila is a Simple-Talk editor who also works as a Brand Manager in the .NET tools division of Red Gate Software. She writes the .NET Reflector newsletter, so if you have any feedback on the content that you want covered, please get in touch with her.

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06 December 2013
06 December 2013

New Developer Conference in London

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The Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC Oslo) has made a name for itself over the years, and is known as the biggest software developer conference (or festival) in Europe. And for the first time ever, the NDC organisers have decided to organise NDC London (New Developer Conference) to give software engineers in the UK a better … Read more
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26 June 2012
26 June 2012

Calling all developers building ASP.NET applications

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We know that developers building desktop apps have to contend with memory management issues, and we’d like to learn more about the memory challenges ASP.NET developers are facing. To be more specific, we’re carrying out some exploratory research leading into the next phase of development on ANTS Memory Profiler, and our development team would love … Read more
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25 May 2012
25 May 2012

Modernizr Rocks HTML5

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HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don’t know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you’re using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn’t, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, … Read more
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17 October 2011
17 October 2011

Finding bugs is difficult, right?

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Something I hear developers tell us all the time is that they take pride in being a developer.and that bugs are a dent in that pride. Someone once told me “I know I have found bugs years later, and it’s the worst feeling in the world.” So how can you avoid that sinking feeling when … Read more
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22 September 2011
22 September 2011

The Metro Surfaces

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Our perceptions of Windows 8 are currently based on the live tiles of Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ and the touch-based ‘Metro’ User-Interface supported by WinRT. The buzz is of a clean, well-designed, but decidedly retro user-interface based on JavaScript+HTML/CSS, and based in tiles that can be rotated, docked or run full screen but not resized. … Read more
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30 June 2011
30 June 2011

Turnkey with LightSwitch

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Microsoft has long wanted to find a replacement for Microsoft Access. The best attempt yet, which is due out in, or before, September is Visual Studio LightSwitch, with which it is said to be as ‘easy as flipping a switch’ to use Silverlight to create simple form-driven business applications. It is easy to get confused … Read more
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03 June 2011
03 June 2011

Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

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After Steve Ballmer’s indiscrete ‘MisSpeak’ about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We’ve now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of ‘Mosh’ at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This … Read more
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17 January 2011
17 January 2011

Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

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I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate’s .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our … Read more
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07 October 2010
07 October 2010

Orchard? No harvest quite yet.

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Microsoft announced last week that it was scrapping its Windows Live Spaces blogging technology, and would make Automattic’s WordPress the default blogging platform for Windows Live. Couldn’t Microsoft’s Orchard, the three-year open-source project to provide a general-purpose website publishing and blogging platform, come up with the goods?  Sadly, it is just bad timing: Orchard is … Read more
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16 September 2010
16 September 2010

Devscovery 2010 – Last Day

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It’s the last day of Devscovery and time to wrap up the Red Gate games by announcing the winner of yesterday’s quiz, and the Red Gate Games Champion, winner of our Grand Prize. Our quiz winner is… David Lambert! David, congratulations! You’ll receive a copy of ANTS Memory Profiler, a $50 Amazon voucher, a copy … Read more
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16 July 2010
16 July 2010

iWorry

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It is an interesting time for any .NET developer wanting to develop software for mobile phones. We’ve always taken it for granted that there would be a good .NET platform for mobile phones. The first anxiety was the delay and feature-drop in Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s reply to the dominant iPhone and Android platforms. … Read more
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18 June 2010
18 June 2010

Will HTML5 make Silverlight redundant?

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One of the great features of Adobe AIR v2 that was launched this month was its support for some of the 2008 draft of HTML5. The HTML5 specification was started in 2004, but the full spec will probably not be approved by W3C until around 2022. One might have thought that it would take years … Read more
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26 March 2010
26 March 2010

Making the WPeFfort

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will be launched on April 12th. The basic layout looks pretty much as it did, so it is not immediately obvious on first inspection that it was completely rewritten in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The current VS 2008 codebase had reached the end of its life; It was getting slow … Read more
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26 February 2010
26 February 2010

Back-sliding into Unmanaged Code

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It is difficult to write about Microsoft’s ambivalence to .NET without mentioning clichés about dog food.  In case you’ve been away a long time, you’ll remember that Microsoft surprised everyone with the speed and energy with which it introduced and evangelised the .NET Framework for managed code. There was good reason for this. Once it … Read more
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28 January 2010
28 January 2010

Nurturing .NET Reflector

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The very best software is almost always originally the creation of a single person. Readers of our ‘Geek of the Week’ will know of a few of them.  Even behemoths such as MS Word or Excel started out with one programmer.  There comes a time with any software that it starts to grow up, and … Read more
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04 January 2010
04 January 2010

The Browser That Ate My Memory

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Have you noticed occasions when your browser suddenly starts eating memory? Even the latest versions of Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer can cause a PC to grind to a halt by grabbing all available memory. Browsers are greedy by their nature. They grab memory for such things as the Back-Forward cache in order to speed … Read more
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08 October 2009
08 October 2009

Speeding up AJAX Applications

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Microsoft’s recent release of Doloto reminded me of the pain of the AJAX Programmer. Doloto is a tool for optimizing an AJAX application by analyzing its workload and splitting the code so that the application will start by transferring only the portion of code necessary to initialize. I can see many web programmers wanting to … Read more
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