I would like to introduce a new endeavor called "Edge Of Dev". The Edge Of Dev will essentially be me sharing video content that I capture from around the development community.  This may be interviews, presentations, open spaces or other content of interest.  My hope is that the Edge Of Dev will provide an additional resource for relevant technical information to help you stay informed about what is happening in the development community.  The first episode is available on the Edge of Dev website (http://www.edgeofdev.com) so I hope you will take a moment to check it out. This week I am at...

When you start working with OpenAccess, one of the first tasks you're going to face is the need set a connection string to your database. And odds are, the connection string you're going to start with is not going to be the connection string your going to use on your production server. It might not even be the connection string your going to use in your test environment. Point is, you need to be able to store multiple connection strings and easily "cue" OpenAccess to use the correct connection details at runtime. Fortunately, OpenAccess makes this easy.   UNDERSTANDING OPENACCESS CONNECTIONS First things first:...

RadChart comes with a versatile collection of preset themes (Summer, Vista, Office). At times you may wish to use one of the predefined themes but customize its appearance a bit to fit your specific scenario / application and the control provides easy mechanism to achieve the desired effect. RadChart uses the concept of style palettes in order to style the various chart series. There are distinct style palettes for the various series types (Line, Bar, Pie, etc.) and each palette can contain as many style elements as you want -- the first style is applied to the first chart series of...

I won't go into detail about how you could use the maybe monad to save a few lines of code as Daniel Earwicker already blogged about it so you'd better read his post. Basically using the IfNotNull extension method you'll be able to replace lines of code like these: string[] url = SplitUrl(urlString); RecordCompany company = Music.GetCompany("4ad.com");     if (company != null)   {       Band band = company.GetBand("Pixies");       if (band != null)       {           Member member = band.GetMember("David");             if (member != null)               return member.Role;       }   }   return null;    with the following: return Music.GetCompany("4ad.com")...

Time does fly fast! More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the then upcoming 2008 and just a wink later it's already 2009! Last year was one that passed by at light speed... I've noticed that when you are at work and you're focused on the daily grind, you often see only the challenges and think about how slow you are progressing. It's great that there are holidays when you slow down a bit and you have time to look back and see that things are much different.   At New Year's Eve my wife and I were...