Aaron Stanard published a blog post about The Next Decade of .NET Open Source. It's a good summary of recent conversations and there's a lot to agree with in the post. In particular, I agree strongly with this point: If Autofac is genuinely the better tool for your business’ case than ASP.NET Core’s built-in DI, the right behavior is to support...

Microsoft just released IE 9. You can tell when Microsoft are serious about a product release when they do it using yet another focus-group inspired website that will be offline before the end of the year (anyone remember the NetFX3 site?). Here are some of IE 9's new features: They stole the combined address bar/search box from Chrome (But...

NB: Download link finally fixed jQueryPad is a fast JavaScript and HTML editor. Just start it, enter the HTML you want to work with, bash in your jQuery code, and hit F5 to see the results. Say goodbye to ALT+TAB. Download jQueryPad is xcopy deployable. It's written in WPF and uses the Web Browser Control to embed Internet Explorer for...

When it comes to dealing with databases, smart .NET developers follow the unit of work pattern. In NHibernate, the unit of work is an ISession. In LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, it's the DataContext/DbContext. When implementing a unit of work, or in fact any object, lifetime matters. When is the unit of work created? When does it end? When...

Here's the configuration file of an application I'm working on: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Repositories.ConnectionString" value="Server=(local)\SQLEXPRESS;Database=XYZ;Trusted_connection=true;"/> <add key="Email.Pop3Host" value="pop.gmail.com"/> <add key="Email.Pop3Port"...

The year was 2009, and I was sick of WordPress. I was a huge fan of StackOverflow and the technology stack they were using, and thought I could "borrow" some of their ideas to create my own blog engine. After a few weeks of hacking with ASP.NET MVC 1.0, my new blog engine, PaulPad, was online. It was badly written, had few features, but it was small...