Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Development

From MSDN Magazine, October 2009.

Object Hydrator - .NET test data project

This looks pretty cool. I discovered it through The Morning Brew blog, I think.

"Project Description
This project allows you to pass custom POCO's to it, and have it return an instance of the class populated with randomly generated data.

So basically, you create a class and decorate the property with the name of a Generator you want to use. Pass the object to the Generator and it returns it filled with data. The idea behind it is to use it to replace a database call to use in your UI. "

Diffuse

Cool new (to me) diff/merge tool. Can merge any arbitrary number of files! How many other diff/merge tools can claim to do that?

Diffuse: "Diffuse is a small and simple text merge tool written in Python. With Diffuse, you can easily merge, edit, and review changes to your code."

Why Git?

Why Git? - great article by Ayende @ Rahien, with a very good discussion that follows. Also it's fairly recent -- 19 days ago.

Yet another Git versus Mercurial article

This one's well-written and the comments that follow are not shrill but intelligent. The author claims that Git is like MacGyver, while Mercurial is James Bond. (A commenter claims that Git is more like the A Team, but hey.) One commenter does a great job describing the attitude of the Git community towards Windows users. In a word, contempt. The thing is, I'm a power user who loves Git, and when I first examined it back in the fall of 2007, it just seemed like a better project for Windows. I'm wondering if I should reevaluate.

Dotnet Version Wiki

Dotnet Version Wiki: "The original data for this list was taken from Tom Glover's site , where you can download a tool (Free DotNet VersionCheck Utility) that automatically identifies what versions of the framework are installed. Tom kindly donated this existing list to seed this wiki.

Another resource you should be aware of is the CTP Build Finder which is based on some data that Brad Abrams and friends put together into BuildXml.xml . This data file links CTP releases of a few major products, showing compatible products, and is the data source that drives the CTP Build Finder..

Another list of service pack version numbers, Aaron Stebner's WebLog ."

How XML Threatens Big Data : Dataspora Blog

How XML Threatens Big Data : Dataspora Blog

Fascinating article. He talks about why XML is philosophically wrong for huge datasets ("Big Data"). I found this article while looking through an HR-XML blog.

"We had a deadline to meet (and, mon dieu, a 35 hour work-week). So we changed course. We hacked our Perl scripts to emit a flat tab-delimited format — “TabML” — which was bulk loaded into Oracle. It wasn’t elegant, but it was fast and it worked.

Yet looking back, I realize that XML was the wrong format from the start. And as I’ll argue here, our unhealthy obsession with XML formats threatens to slow or impede many open data projects, including initiatives like Data.gov.

In the next sections, I discuss how XML fails for Big Data because of its unnatural form, bulk, and complexity. Finally, I generalize to three rules that advocate a more liberal approach to data."

The truth about HR-XML

One guy says it's a bunch of BS. Another guy says it's a fig leaf to cover up for lack of interoperability. Finally, there's a former member of the HR-XML consortium who has some things to say about it.

Here's an older post by the same author: HR-XML Integration in Human Resources Software.

Overview of WCF from Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN)

Overview of WCF -Great article with links to articles on interoperability, which is something I've got to worry about with these legacy web services.

How to: Migrate ASP.NET Web Service Code to the Windows Communication Foundation

How to: Migrate ASP.NET Web Service Code to the Windows Communication Foundation -This is a comprehensive, 19-step procedure that's a bit more detailed than this post and also blessed by Microsoft.

creativeUI - How To: Create a Web Service with WCF

creativeUI - How To: Create a Web Service with WCF -- Seemingly quick and dirty explanation.

Converting ASMX to WCF Web Service - Stack Overflow

Converting ASMX to WCF Web Service - Stack Overflow: "I need to upgrade our web services to use WCF instead of ASMX. If the signatures of the web services stays the same, will existing clients that already call the ASMX service have to change anything on their end? Is there anyway to still use WCF but not force them to change anything?"

The answer is simple. I tried it and it worked. I did have to change the server binding config to be the custom binding created by svcutil.exe. But since that utility creates the configuration, it's basically a cut-and-paste job.