Little wonders of C#

C# is a wonderful programming language and the Hare's compilation of little wonders of C# make the developer more proficient. Get all the little wonders here.

• C#/.NET Five Little Wonders (part 1)
• C#/.NET Five More Little Wonders (part 2)
• C#/.NET Five Final Little Wonders (part 3)
• C#/.NET Two More Little Wonders

In addition to that check "Advanced C#" chapter excerpt from C# 3.0 in a Nutshell and Visual C# 2010 code samples.

MSDN subscription Activated

Many thanks to my MVP friend Prasanna for giving me free MSDN subscription. I have activated my subscription and queued the downloads to play around with the new technologies.

I am thankful to two great guys Prasanna and Merill in my IT career and I was lucky enough to work with the guys who have been actively involved in sharing knowledge to the community and I am one proud beneficiary. Long life you guys.

CIMA exams journey comes to an end.

I got through TOPCIMA exam finally and still I could not believe I got 66 credits (33/50). TOPCIMA or current T4 is the final hurdle in CIMA journey and differs significantly from previous stage exams. Test your professional competence as Management Accountant and previously known as case study exam which is based on pre seen case study and unseen material on the exam day. One of the very hard exams in my career perhaps I have been in IT industry from the start. This will open up the gates to ACMA and CPA routes.

I have achieved one of the milestone for this year and I need to complete the Viva (Presentation) on my research thesis “Empirical Study of Identifying value drivers in Software Industry” to claim my ‘MBA in IT’. I am trying to get the presentation dates from the Computer Science department of University of Moratuwa and hope I will get viva dates this year to complete my MBA in IT degree. I do strongly believe in famous saying in Tamil “Learn theft and then forget”.

jQuery - Rising from Horizon

I am back after my CIMA exams and hope that I will clear the last hurdle in CIMA this time.

Until now I really did not get a chance to apply jQuery in full scale in our web projects and now in the current project I have got a chance to play around with jQuery. We have been moving away from Updatepanels and use jQuery for AJAX calls and I have to tell you that learning experience is awesome. I usually hate javascript programming but now jQuery has changed that and I have started to love javascript programming now. I don’t know why I missed looking at jQuery before. I found this #Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips# very useful and the comments also second it.

On the other note I have started attending .NET user group meetings in Sydney and as far as I know there are minimum of 4 .NET user groups. I have attended architecture user group meeting on last Thursday. There will be another user group meeting by Sydney Deep .NET User Group on 1^st of July 2010 and for more details visit http://www.sdnug.org/

Enterprise Library 5.0 Released

The long waited enterprise library 5.0 is released now and the collection of reusable software components is designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. The application blocks are the center piece of enterprise library and developers cake piece.

For more details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff632023.aspx

Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services Line of Business Application - Hands On Lab

If you want to get hands on WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 then Swiss MSDN team has developed 108 pages Hands On Lab (HOL) manual. The HOL uses Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and Beta 1 of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to create a data driven line of business style rich internet application and it is a great way to expose to the new technologies.

The HOL is an order management system that shows a list of orders in a datagrid and details of an order in a details pane.

The following features are covered in the HOL and you will be exposed to the new “AutoCompleteBox”, “BusyIndicator”, “DataForm” and “DataPager” Silverlight controls:
· Entity framework and service layer definition
· Data filtering, paging, sorting and grouping
· Data modification and validation
· Foreign key management
· Projections
· Programmatic printing from a Silverlight application
· COM interop with Microsoft Excel

Disclaimer: Expect Visual Studio 2010 crashes and in my case it was more than 20 times and your patience is required to complete the lab.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/D/74D51112-BC02-46DA-ACDD-E6138940306A/SL4-LOB-RIA-Lab.zip

HTML 5

It is true that HTML 5 would be a ground breaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification but the sad point of that it is going to take 5 to 10 years to become fully acceptable standard in the market.

It is always good to use industry standards rather than going with proprietary standards especially in web development for cross browser support. HTML 5 tackles the gap that Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX are trying to fill but in my point of view, HTML 5 is not a replacement to these technologies. Time can only tell which technology will mature in the market and definitely they will at least have their own niche place in the web market.

As a developer or technology evangelist it is important to know the impact(s) of the html 5 specifications in web development and main browsers already started adding HTML 5 features in their latest browsers. Have a look at html5demos.com for the html 5 features and video,cross-document messaging, canvas, local storage support are some of the cool features of HTML 5. At the moment Apple Safari leads the html 5 support and IE 8 lags in adding html 5 support compare to other browsers. Will Youtube be using HTML 5 instead of flash in the future?