I’ve always wanted to hook in to Goolges Picasa Web Album to allow for sites to store and display photos from Picasa, and I have just found a great blog from Richard Nilsson on the startings of building a photo album on your site, well worth a visit.
Google also has a Picasa Web Albums Data API for .NET, so what ae we waiting for?
I’ve been using Anonymous methods and Lambdas extressions for a little while now, but I do find as I go from customer to customer, do they really understand what all this means?
I can now safely say that Mike Taulty has posted a very good blog on the subject, which should assist in helping people to understand what it is all about.
Another useful link is from Devx From Delegate to Lambda
Microsoft have release MVC Release Candidate 1, I’ve had a little play with MVC and it looks very promising, although it is a different way of programming for your web site, the benefits are huge.
You can download MVC Release Candidate 1 from this link
I’m personally going to wait for our usergroup member to publish his book before I take a leap in to the MVC world.
I’m selling my Ski Boots on Ebay, if any one is interested
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300289215769
I’m not currently working on WCF, but I when I find some useful links I’ll add them here
Set of links for WCF
Getting Started with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
If you’re going to do any extensive WCF services it is worth getting hold of Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy
I’ve been playing with my Weather station, Watson W-8681, since Christmas Day, and I love it.
It came in a small box, all tidy and wanting to be built on Christmas day
Taking it all out of the box, you get the rain water measurer, wind direction, software CD, temp and wireless sensor and a cover to protect it, wind speed and all the fixing clamps needed.
The LCD display is very clear, and it is wireless, which means I can place it anywhere in the house and still know what is happening outside. A single click anywhere on the LCD display lights up the panel for easy viewing.
Once the instruments are all assembled, it looks like a real weather station.
Software need to run the weather station, and pick up the data, which then stores all the data in EasyWeather.dat file
To enable upload to the Internet I used Cumulus software which take the EasyWeather.dat file and processes it, uploading html file via FTP and it also allow you to upload the data to Weather Underground, to allow others to see your results
I have all my data being sent to the village web site
All in all I am very pleased with the Weather Station. The software is very retro and could do with being update, perhaps to WPF or Silverlight, but I don’t have the time at the moment to embark on a new project.
When you start to play with the Entity Framework you will soon come up with the need to store your connection in a common place. To do this you will need to with provide the connection string to the Entity Object Context or provide the Entity Connection. I prefer to us the Entity Connection as you can explicity define each section of the connection.
C#
VB.NET
and if you need to pass in the UserID and Password
For some more help on setting this up check out Ricka on Dynamic Data
After using StructureMap for a while I thought it would be nice to generate a simple example of how it all works, so I’ve built in Visual Studio 2008, both C# and a VB.NET version.
StructreMap Example.zip (4.47 kb)
StructureMapExampleVB.zip (9.41 kb)
For more information on StructureMap please go to their main website
If you need to know more about IoC’s then it’s worth making a look at the following links:
List of .NET Dependency Injection Containers (IOC)
What with Entity Framework around, I have been finding it quite hard to find any good information about the Framework, so I have started to compile a list of good resources
The ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
Mike Taulty is Mr Entity Framework
Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework
Have you ever had a table to a lot of rows, when I mean a lot I mean over 1,000,000 records.
If you try and perform a row count like
SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM table
it just takes forever.
If you are running SQL server you can perform a look up in the sysindexes table
SELECT rows
FROM sysindexes
WHERE id = OBJECT_ID(‘table‘)
AND indid < 2
much fast, but not so easy.