When I first started using ASP.NET (back in the .NET 1.0 days), I was in awe of the sheer capabilities it offered. For a humble ASP/VB developer, this was a welcome change. The Page object model seemed to be a work of art. “Code-behind” seemed to be one of the coolest things. Eight years down the line, my perspective has slowly started to change. All of a sudden, I have started to question the very design of ASP.NET (at least the object model and the Page Lifecycle). I have started to

It is customary to conceive any large application to be composed of several logical layers. It is also a practice to reduce the coupling between the layers. Typically, one would create an interface for each class of each layer and they would be coupled to the downstream layer classes only though interfaces. You would also typically want to unit test each class in each layer. By definition, each of unit test would test a method of only one class and not the downstream classes it depends on. To achieve

Naming convention in Workflows Workflow activities should be named appropriately. As much as possible, they should reflect names form the business domain. For example, it wouldn’t appear good to have names like ifelseActivity1 or callExternalMethodActivity1. Instead, it is good to have names like ifProductsExists and MakePayment respectively. Shown below is a good example of the same: Custom activity names should really represent their purpose. Good examples are ApproveRequestActivity. It is

It’s been a awfully long time since I have published a blog entry, and it seems like the world of technology has changed quite a bit since! The hiatus is over now, and I would like to starting putting down some thoughts and experiences on my new interest – Connected Systems. WF and WCF are the pretty much the atoms for building connected systems on the .NET platform, and a large percentage of my upcoming posts would be focused on these technologies. In this post, I want to talk about

.NET 3.0 has been made available to all the developers recently. With it comes a set of new set of API, which are simply there to unleash the .NET developer’s potential to create the next wave of powerful applications. These API, formerly called WinFX, take the form of four pillars – WCF , WF , WPF and WCS . In this post of mine, I would like to give a perspective on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Most typically, one starts off an introduction to WCF by explaining the four tenets of

I have come across several situations where I need some sort of Timeout functionality for a particular operation. At the same time, I also needed a provision for retrying the operation a few times before calling quits. I thought about a solution using ManualResetEvent and a Timer which I have outlined below: const int MAX_RETRIES = 5; const int RETRY_INTERVAL = 10; //10 seconds const int OPERATION_TIMEOUT = 1; //1 minute static void DoOperation() { int retries = 0; int timeout = 0; ManualResetEvent

Generics offer tremendous flexibility – in more ways than you would ever know. Predicates are a good example for this. .NET 2.0 BCL comes with certain generic delegates – Action<T> , Predicate<T> , and Converter<Tin, Tout> respectively. Their definitions are given below: public delegate TOutput Converter<TInput, TOutput>(TInput input); public delegate void Action<T>(T obj); public delegate bool Predicate<T>(T obj); If you look at the definitions, you

In my previous post on Web 2.0 , I mentioned that one of the new trends in the web today is that of “mashups”. The idea is about getting data from multiple, disparate sources and collating them in interesting ways. For example, let’s say we need to create a mashup involving a map showing all theatres playing the highest rated (most popular) movie in a particular city. Now, to develop this, one would need several pieces of data from several sources. First of all, you need to use map services (like

Web 2.0 – undoubtedly, is one of the most debated software buzzwords in the recent times. [The other term, in my opinion, which has attracted a lot of debate (and abuse) in the recent history is SOA]. To many, it is just about embracing new techniques, which are DHTML and JavaScript centric. But excavating the early manuscripts of Web 2.0 (like Tim O’Reilly's canonical Web 2.0 article ) reveals a bigger picture. So, what exactly is Web 2.0? Here’s another very brief perspective to add to thousand

The other day, I was watching the PDC presentations on WCF and one of them was on hosting WCF services by Steve Maine. Part of the presentation was about hosting Indigo on Windows services (or NT Services). One of the demos had a small and very interesting tip on debugging service startup, which I shall try to elaborate here. I always wondered how the service startup code could be debugged. There are two problems which you would face invariably. First of all, there is no process to which you can