Category Archives: Learn

Entity Framework Code First Migrations

By Shahed C on April 21, 2013
7 Replies

Updates:

  • the sample files are available on the Downloads page.
  • this speaking engagement has been added to a new Speaking page

Original Post:

I recently spoke at NoVA Code Camp (at Microsoft’s Reston VA office) about Entity Framework Code First Migrations. This talk was about the Data Layer of an enterprise web application, part of a larger presentation about Lean Enterprise Architecture. It was followed by presentations on the Domain Layer and Presentation Layer, given by my colleagues Sahil Talwar and Doguhan Uluca.

So what the heck is (are?) Code First Migrations? Read on to find out!

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Hitting Breakpoints in Global.asax

By Shahed C on March 23, 2013
4 Replies

Every .NET developer should know how to set breakpoints in Visual Studio 2012.

  • Right-click a line in your code, then select Breakpoint -> Insert Breakpoint.
  • Or, simply press F9 after placing your cursor on the line of code.

But, what if that line of code is in your Global.asax code? Will the breakpoint still work when you run the application? If not, what can you do to get it to work?

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Getting Started with Knockout.js and MVVM

By Shahed C on March 10, 2013
5 Replies

Introduction

JavaScript is almost as old as the first graphical browsers, but it has been swimming in a sea of spaghetti code since its inception. With the introduction of many JavaScript frameworks over the years, there has been a lot of improvement in making it a robust programming language. One such framework is Knockout.js, which uses the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern to bind HTML templates to a JavaScript view model.

Knockout logo

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Study Guides for MCSD 70-480 Programming HTML5/JS/CSS3

By Shahed C on February 23, 2013
2 Replies

I recently took and passed the Microsoft exam MCSD 70-480 “Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3”.

html5_css_javascript

 

However, this exam is relatively new as of early 2013, and the official book wasn’t out yet when I first published this blog post. It is now available for purchase, as of Spring 2013.

To prepare for the exam, you may refer to the following online resources:

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“All Your Database Are Belong To Us!”

By Shahed C on February 16, 2013
9 Replies

My first technical post in this blog involves a solution that my team and I implemented at work recently. The project is a .NET Web project in Visual Studio 2012.

The Problem:

Each developer on the team has a personal copy of the database for a web application. How will you store each connection string for each developer, without revealing your login information to others?

A Path to a Solution:

(A) Each developer could place their connection string in the Web.config file, without checking in their file. This is not a good choice, because they will eventually need to make other changes to the Web.config file and would have to remember to revert the connection string before each check-in. If they accidentally check in the file with their connection string, they would be sharing it with everyone.

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