Productivity

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")...

I hope I haven’t confused anyone mentioning the weak points of test automation in my previous post. The gained experience however indicates the importance of looking into test automation based on straight-forward and easily maintained solutions. That’s a problem people have been trying to solve for more then a decade now. In the current post I’d like to get your attention to a key of successful test automation via using the tools extensibility. Nowadays there are plenty of test automation solutions especially for the well-known platforms like ASP.NET Web. Should you consider automate your testing activities, you will probably ...

I’ve run into this error before and last night it reared its ugly head again. You’ll find it from time to time when switching to Design View in Visual Studio to work with custom server controls. The bug is in Service Pack 1 of VS and can be quite annoying.   It has been submitted to Microsoft and they claim to be working on a solution which will “fix it in subsequent releases” of Visual Studio. Unfortunately, developers (like me) don’t want their productivity to suffer while we all wait for a fix from Microsoft. So here are a couple of steps...

Just a quick follow-up: we uploaded the application sample as a code library item named "Using OpenAccess with SilverLight and Ado.Net Data Services" and it is available at:...

After we prepared our data service it is time to put some client UI into it. I must apologize in advance as the only UI that I’ve used is a ListBox control, and it looks… well pretty much ugly. The goal was to proof that the whole setup works as expected, not to design a profound UI solution. I am pretty sure that as a follow up, our SilverLight team will enhance the sample to a full-scale integration example very soon.