Source: The Gryphin Experience
- Performance Tuning Visual Studio Builds | James Lewis – blog – I’d been hearing a lot of complaints recently about slow build times from all the guys on our team so I took a day out of development to try and speed up their local builds. I started with a solution with about 32 projects and a build time of just over a minute. I then experimented with the following tips and tweaks and got the build time down to 12s flat. The following documents my findings – really hope it helps someone!
- Rockify.TV – Music to your eyes – Rockify.TV is a music video app that makes it easy and fun to discover new music and share that music with your friends!
- The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore – Scott Hanselman – What happens when all the things we based our icons on don't exist anymore? Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery?
- Helvetica Meets Super Heroes – For all you Helvetica lovers out there (myself included, although we are taking a break), French design student and illustrator René Mambembe has managed to turn the Helvetica alphabet into iconic super heroes and villains, while still keeping with the original characters (pun intended).
- Hoe hou jij je smartphone schoon? Enkele tips! – The Mobile Revolution | The Mobile Revolution – De Smaakpolitie is een programma op VT4 dat nog maar eens aantoont dat sommige mensen het helaas niet zo nauw nemen met hun hygiëne. Ook onze gadgets ontsnappen er niet aan. 16% van de smartphones hebben sporen van uitwerpselen! Wellicht even nadenken voordat je de iPad leent van je buurman?
- SQL VIEW Basics – SQL Views are essential for the database developer. However, it is common to see them misued, or neglected. Joe Celko tackles an introduction to the subject, but there is something about the topic that makes it likely that even the experienced developer will find out something new from reading it.
- Handling Deadlocks in SQL Server – In this excerpt from his book Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA, Jonathan Kehayias provides a guide to identifying the causes, reacting to,and ultimately preventing the dreaded deadlock.
- The Nerd Parent’s Guide: When and how to introduce your kids to Star Wars – Scott Hanselman – Let me start by saying I'm not a big Star Wars guy. I enjoyed the films when I was growing up (I think I saw the original (Ep. 4 ANH) in 1980 along with Empire Strikes Back in 1980) but I haven't thought much about them since. That said,I appreciate the films and I like movies in general. Watching movies with my kids (usually Pixar movies) have brought us a lot of shared joy as a family. However, Star Wars are fun and classics and we wanted to share them with our kids in a way that worked for everyone given their age and our parenting style.
- Besparen op je dataverbruik met Onavo Extend – The Mobile Revolution | The Mobile Revolution –
- Using delegates, func and lambdas: a tutorial with soldiers « Timdams’s Blog – In this tutorial, written for beginning programmers, I’d like to show a little demonstration on the usage of delegates and how we can go all crazy by refactoring and magically see all our duplicate code disappear.
- C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Enumerable.Repeat() Static Method – Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here.
So last week we covered the Enumerable.Range() method in the System.Linq namespace, which gives us a handy way to generate a sequence of integers to either use directly, or to feed into a more complex expression. Today we’re going to look at another static method called Enumerable.Repeat() that allows us to repeat an element the specified number of times.
- Creating Parallel Tasks with TaskFactory :: BlackWasp Software Development – The Task Parallel Library provides a number of ways in which parallel tasks can be instantiated. This article describes the use of the TaskFactory class, which uses the factory method design pattern to generate and start tasks with a single method call.
- Forms Can Be Beautiful Too – Like all structural elements built into HTML, forms aren’t inherently beautiful. In fact, forms on their own are quite ugly and dull, which is exactly why it’s usually a good idea not to leave form styling up to the browser and OS. Sadly, this happens all the time.
The good news is, it’s not hard at all for designers, developers and dabblers to get a pretty and usable form up and running with little effort (HTML5Rocks and NetTuts both provide great guides), some CSS, and sometimes a bit of JavaScript. Forms can and should be beautiful, this way you’ll know you’re providing the right experience for everyone.
- The key to AddOrUpdate | One Unicorn – The DbSet.Find method provides an easy way to lookup an entity given its primary key. One place this can be useful is in an AddOrUpdate method when loading an entity which can then be updated with values from another application tier—for example, updating an entity with values from a client in a web application.
However, it isn’t so easy to do this in a generic way on any entity type without specific knowledge of which properties make up the primary key. This is something we will make easier in a future release of EF, but for now this blog post shows how to write some extension methods that make this process easier.
- 7 Apps for Mastering Your Mobile Data Usage – Data is power, as the saying goes. But when it comes to mobile data plans, that power lies squarely in the hands of wireless network providers. Consumers pay too much for too little: AT&T;’s cheapest data plan option is $20 a month for 300MB, and Verizon’s is $30 for 2GB.
There’s also the risk of overage charges: Watch too many YouTube videos on your smartphone, and you’ll pay extra for exceeding your monthly data allotment. And data management is even an issue for people lucky enough to be grandfathered into now-defunct unlimited data plans. These folks suffer reduced bandwidth speeds as they explore the limits of what “unlimited” really means.
Nonetheless, with the help of a few crafty apps, you can wrestle a bit of data power back into your hands. The following seven downloads will help manage your data usage, track and compare data speeds, and help you get more out of the limited data you have.
Gunnar Vermeir, one of our experts, regularly blogs at The Gryphin Experience.
