Abstracting System Time in ASP.NET Applications

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When designing web applications, it is a good idea to be cautious about the way you handle the time of day and calendar. It can get complicated when you have servers in different time zones and the user of the time-sensitive application may, or may not, want his local time, including daylight-saving adjustments, to be assumed. Problems pop up unexpectedly, so maybe it is better to tackle the issue up-front. Dino Esposito explains.… Read more

Managing the Password of the Application’s User

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How can you ensure that passwords conform to a policy, even if they are used for connecting applications to databases? Absolving them from the policy is a security risk and you don't want to trouble the users with password changes. Dennes Torres shows how to manage application users’ passwords in Entity Framework; so that no one, not even the database and IT administrators, knows the current password.… Read more

Creating a C++/CLI Wrapper

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The C++/CLI is a dialect of C++ that is designed to work with the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). It is a replacement for 'Managed C++' and makes every feature of the CLI easily accessible from C++. Mircea demonstrates the architecture that is involved in a C++/CLI wrapper that allows you to use both managed and unmanaged code, and to provide the choice of controlling memory directly.… Read more

Using SQL Server Query Hints with Entity Framework

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Entity Framework (EF) is designed to work with a variety of data sources. Although this presents many advantages, there is a downside that many of the special features of a data source such as SQL Server are off-limits. Query Hints are an example: though often misused, they are occasionally important. Dennes Torres shows how you can use these in EF, using a command interceptor that will allow you to use any query hint with SQL Server.… Read more

Visual Studio 2017 and Swagger: Building and Documenting Web APIs

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The OpenAPI ‘Swagger’ Specification defines a protocol that allows applications to discover, and generate documentation of methods, parameters and models of REST APIs, This provides a way for any software to identify the features of a REST API. It does for REST APIs what WSDL (Web Service Description Language) did for web services. Visual Studio now provides it to support proxy creation for REST APIs, as Dennes Torres explains.… Read more

Control the Controller in ASP.NET MVC

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Because of its obvious importance in coordinating the MVC application, we tend to be wary of being too adventurous with it, but there are some interesting features that can sometimes be exploited to provide for less common requirements. The controller in ASP.NET MVC core, for example, can be a plain-old C# class (POCO), making it easier to create file-based content on the fly. The DefaultControllerFactory class can be changed, and you can override the GetControllerType method with a custom factory to give you localized routes and URLs. Dino explores some of the interesting internals of ASP.NET MVC controllers… Read more

A Visual Lexicon of LINQ

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LINQ is best learned from examples, but few LINQ resources supply, along with the code, pictures that illustrate what each associated LINQ operator in the code is doing. This article is a visual index of all LINQ operators, that explain clearly with code and illustrations what even the most arcane LINQ operators actually do. To increase your enlightenment, it is accompanied with a reference chart to provide even more detail. Michael Sorens is, with these two articles, determined to persuade you of the power of LINQ.… Read more

A Visual Lexicon of LINQ: The Wallchart

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Here is a handy wallchart that condenses the information contained in our article 'The Visual LINQ Lexicon' even further, but which adds some more technical specs that allow you, for example, to see at a glance which operators use deferred execution and which use immediate execution. You can use it to see what operators use lambda syntax and which ones are available in query syntax. You can see all the other key properties of all the LINQ operators, even including even how much of a sequence a given operator actually consumes. Click here to download the PDF version of the reference chart: … Read more

Ten Unsung Visual Studio Time-Savers

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We all have our favourite third-party extensions to Visual Studio, and although we all like Resharper, there are many others that could well make your development work easier. To celebrate the fact that Visual Studio Enterprise now includes ReadyRoll Core, SQL Prompt Core, and SQL Search as part of the Data storage and processing workload, Michael Sorens describes nine of his current favourite extensions, and wonders if he's missing anything in his list.… Read more

Scala and Apache Spark in Tandem as a Next-Generation ETL Framework

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Scala and Apache Spark might seem an unlikely medium for implementing an ETL process, but there are reasons for considering it as an alternative. After all, many Big Data solutions are ideally suited to the preparation of data for input into a relational database, and Scala is a well thought-out and expressive language. Krzysztof Stanaszek describes some of the advantages and disadvantages of a scala-based approach to implementing and testing an ETL solution. … Read more

Building Better Entity Framework Applications

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Entity Framework (EF) is Microsoft’s Object/Relational (ORM) database access library, with a new generation, EF Core, released in 2016. In this article Jon P Smith looks at six different software principles and patterns that help to keep the EF code nicely separated from the rest of the application. The six approaches make the EF database access code is easier to write, test, refactor and, most importantly, performance-tune.… Read more

What is the Go Language, and Why is it Useful?

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When Google announced the 'Go' language in 2009 we were all underexcited. After all, a compiled, statically typed language in the tradition of Algol and C isn't that radical, especially one that eschewed generic programming, implicit type conversions, assertions, inheritance and pointer arithmetic. However, it has proved to be robust, highly-portable, simple to use, and productive to work with. Ed Elliott reckons that it is definitely worth checking it out. … Read more

User Acceptance Testing and the Application Lifecycle

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User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is an important part of the development process. If carried out as early as possible and as regularly as possible, it not only alerts the development team to aspects that don't yet meet the requirements of the users, but also gives governance a better idea of progress. If UAT is delayed, defects become expensive and troublesome to fix. Sophia Segal gives an experienced summary view of UAT… Read more

Continuous Code Quality Inspection with SonarQube

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There are many ways that static code analysis can help to speed software delivery. It can pick up, as a preliminary to check-in, errors and weaknesses in code that can happen incidentally to even the most experienced developer. It can give the team a measure of technical debt, and remove the obvious 'noise' from code before it is reviewed. Vishwas introduces a popular Code-quality inspection tool, SonarQube, and takes you through the basics of using it with C# and Java. … Read more

Code Smells: Raw Strings and the Subtle Syntax Catastrophe

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All sorts of complex data can be represented as a string but that doesn't mean you can treat them merely as strings. There are so many things that can go wrong if you assume that generic string operations such as concatenation can serve to create complex markup, expressions, codes and serialised objects. It pays instead to create dedicated builders for any such complex data that you may need to create. Michael Sorens explains some defensive coding to make for a more robust application.… Read more

Securing Web Applications

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If you are developing a web application, almost every design decision you make can introduce a security flaw if you get it wrong. Although attacks are becoming more common, and more widely reported, the same common errors continue to provide the most opportunities for hackers. OWASP provides a 'top ten' security problems. Vishwas here describes them and explains how to avoid them… Read more

LINQ Debugging and Visualization

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LINQ is certainly extraordinarily useful. It brings the power of query expressions to C#, allowing an easy way of getting the data you need from a variety of data sources. Up to now, there hasn't been a VS debugger for LINQ that gives you the means to visualise the data at every point in the chain. Michael Sorens, a keen LINQ user, describes a third-party tool that now promises to make using LINQ something we can all participate in.… Read more

Development Delusions: That it is Enough to Build a Better Mousetrap

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You've written a superb, clever, application that you are trying to encourage your colleagues to use. They're not interested. Why? You've neglected the documentation. Surely, the saying goes 'Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door'? Nope, not without comprehensive and complete documentation and marketing, it won't. Documentation is the secret of ensuring that good software will succeed. … Read more

Managing Packages Using Windows PowerShell

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Windows hasn't had a package manager in the style of the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) of Linux distributions. Apt-get is a great way of installing packages and other software. We have Chocolatey, of course which has a growing library of software and even allows you to automatically update software. Now PowerShell has an 'official' way of using any system, such as NuGet, Chocolatey, GitHub or PSget. It is definitely useful and likely to mature into an indispensable tool for Windows users. Nicolas explains why… Read more

4 Keys to a Clean Angular Implementation

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Can there be true separation of concerns with MVC? Not entirely, especially when Angular's templates allow you so much flexibility; but there is a great deal to be gained from following guidelines to ensure that all business logic is performed in the code-behind as directed by the controller or its delegate, and that all operations on the model are done in the controller: Michael Sorens explains the four essential guidelines for an easily-maintained system.… Read more

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