If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

StudioShell is a project that sort of blew my mind. The crazy PowerShell integration they’ve packaged into this visual studio extension is plain amazing.

I’d highly recommend watching the demo videos near the bottom of the project’s home codeplex site.

http://studioshell.codeplex.com/

You can get EF 4.3 by installing the latest version of the EntityFramework NuGet package.

A summary of changes between 4.2 & 4.3:

• New Code First Migrations Feature. This is the primary new feature in EF 4.3 and allows a database created by Code First to be incrementally changed as your Code First model evolves.
• Removal of EdmMetadata table. If you allow Code First to create a database by simply running your application (i.e. without explicitly enabling Migrations) the creation will now take advantage of improvements to database schema generation we have implemented as part of Migrations.
• Bug fix for GetDatabaseValues. In earlier releases this method would fail if your entity classes and context were in different namespaces. This issue is now fixed and the classes don’t need to be in the same namespace to use GetDatabaseValues.
• Bug fix to support Unicode DbSet names. In earlier releases you would get an exception when running a query against a DbSet that contained some Unicode characters. This issue is now fixed.
• Data Annotations on non-public properties. Code First will not include private, protected, or internal properties by default. Even if you manually included these members in your model, using the Fluent API in previous versions of Code First would ignore any Data Annotations on these members. This is now fixed and Code First will process the Data Annotations once the private, protected, or internal properties are manually included in the model.
• More configuration file settings. We’ve enabled more Code First related settings to be specified in the App/Web.config file. This gives you the ability to set the default connection factory and database initializers from the config file. You can also specify constructor arguments to be used when constructing these objects. More details are available in the EF 4.3 Configuration File Settings blog post.

More details and walkthroughs are available over on the ADO.NET team blog here.

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

AboditNLP is a Natural Language Processor library. This kind of stuff in interesting, but not something I have chosen to spend my time on.

It has a demo http://nlp.abodit.com/home/demo which gives you sample things to type to the library. I noticed it was a bit case sensitive, but still, project is one to look into if you were to say build a home automation system.

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

Northwind.Db is a version of the infamous Northwind database packaged in an awesomely easy install/setup NuGet package. I’ll outline the experience of installing the Northwind.Db into a sample project.

After executing the below command in my Package Manager Console

Install-Package Northwind.Db

I was presented with a wizard where I could choose what type of database model I wanted to use.

How did I want to generate my model?

Where should it connect to (Notice the Northwind database was already setup for me).

And now I had the Northwind database all setup and ready to go.

I’m not quite sure why it installed twice. (once in the root of my test project, and the other in the App_Data folder)

I also couldn’t use the Uninstall-Package command to remove the project

The process cannot access the file '…App_Data\Northwind.MDF' because it is being used by another process.

Regardless of some of the issues, if I had to quickly get a sample sql database up and running this would be nice and easy.

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

Deleporter is a project I used over a year ago. It allows you to setup a delegate and execute it in a different process.

For Example: You spin up a unit/integration test project. Over in IIS you have a web site running. Now how do you do things like mock out crazy dependencies, adjust the time in your favorite SystemTime implementation or just tweak the configuration on the fly?

You can leverage Deleporter to execute code over on the web server controlled by your test project.

I’d recommend your go read the introductory blog post

Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET

A few points from the video:

• Ryan was working on a math PhD (Algebraic Topology), dropped out and moved to South America with no money
• Ryan thinks Ruby has the most beautiful syntax, but all the assumptions about it are based on lies (Ruby is f*cked because it can only run on one thread)
• Node was heavily influenced by Zed Shaw’s Mongrel. The idea that a webserver can be just a simple lib which does request/response (not necessarily a directory of files tied to file system)
• Node was started trying to find the best way of notifying a user, real time, about the status of file upload over the web (who would have thought?)
• The best thing about javascript on the server is that no one had used it. No way way to open a file, open a socket etc. This is good, because if there was, they would have done it wrong
• Ryan quit his job and worked on node for 6 mos straight convinced it was ‘a thing’. Begged for a slot at JSConf in Berlin. Blew people away with an IRC chat server written in 400 lines of JS (had to demo on a different laptop and no idea if the demo would even work)
• Some new up-and-coming node features like Node domains
• Ryan and his team makes finger gestures and sound effects when talking about things like latency and load balancing

Ryan tells a great story, and as with any great story comes great lessons. The ones that really struck home with me:

1. Sometimes you have to quit good things in order to achieve great things
2. The obvious solution to your problem might be right in front of your face

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

DynamicXaml takes a fluent approach to building up xaml in code. Following the pattern laid down by the HtmlTags project, this project provides a very clean way to write out your xaml code in C#.

I’ve copied a sample from the github readme below.

var _builder = new XamBuilder();
var button =
  _builder.Start<Button>()
    .Margin("5,0")
    .WidthAndHeight(200d,30d)
    .Create();

One of the things I like about these projects is if you can’t use markup and are pushed to write your xaml in C#, you can apply some great tricks to reduce duplication with your code. (Not sure how this library works out, but I would suspect that if you created a default Button object, it would allow you to override specific properties one at a time or extend with new properties. This way you can create your base controls and only tweak as necessary.

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

Have you ever wanted to generate a number that could potentially have millions of digits and do arbitrary mathematical operations against it? Ya, me neither. But if I did, I would take a look at this project.

IntX is

an arbitrary precision integers class written in pure C# with fast – about O(N * log N) – multiplication/division algorithms implementation. Runs on .NET 2.0+.

The intx.codeplex site has quite a bit of info about the project (TL;DR). If you’d like to learn more I’d suggest checking it out.

If you are coming to this series of posts for the first time you might check out my introductory post for a little context.

Burro is a project that I only quickly looked at. I don’t know all that it does, or how to get it up and running. In the project’s readme it says

I’ll put some examples up as things progress, for now you’ll just have to work it out yourself.

What I do know is that it is supposed to parse build output from a build server in a consistent way. How do I know that? (The github project says).

What is it?

Burro is a tool for parsing output from build servers in a consistent way.

I only put this in here as a project to look at. I think that parsing build output sounds very challenging and props to this project for giving it a go…

I hear you Scott.

Social Media is junk food, and my brain is overweight! I used to have a healthy technical blog and really enjoyed contributing to the community through writing. That was over 21 mos ago. Since then I have become a complacent retweeter (with occasional joke). Looking around at some of my favorite blogs, I can see many of you have fallen into the same trap (you know who you are).

Hey we all need a break, and that’s cool, but it’s time to start blogging again. Now don’t’ run out and write one of those “My blog has been really quiet lately so this is the first post in an amazing series I am going to do” posts, because we all know how that one turns out. Instead, I just make an honest effort by writing one post, and have a good time doing it.

Scott shares some good pointers-

“Blog your opinions. Blog your cool project, or your latest useful function or library. Don’t blog if it feels like work. Blog and get excited when someone comments. Often the comments are more fun and more useful than the post itself. Be passionate, but not rude. Point out failings, but suggest solutions. Organize. Invent.“

I have also started a personal blog over at jarodferguson.com where I am sharing my not-so-technical stuff. I have been meaning to do this for years. You know what? So far I really like it! It feels great because its MY content, MY brand. Twitter, Facebook, Path, Pinterest etc etc can take a back seat. Sure I will still enjoy them, but going forward I plan on doing a lot less ‘managing’ content across my networks. Blog first, social media site of the day second (besides Posterous makes it pretty easy to publish to all these other sites).

So how about you? Why not brush off that keyboard and share with us? You never know who might really enjoy your thoughts.