Tim Hoolihan

…or some other catchy metaphor that will grab your attention. These technologies were hot over the last 5 years. Flex gained a particular amount of popularity in the Java community where UI technologies have a bit of a spotty record (that’s like saying my Bengals have a bit of a spotty record over a lifetime). [...]

Build answered a lot of questions for developers who wondered about the future of the Microsoft platform. WinRT is the new API for “Metro ” applications, which are streamlined enable both tablet and pc inputs. These applications can be built in .Net or native C++ using XAML, or in JavaScript with Html5. The traditional desktop [...]

As a consultant, I’m sometimes a part of projects that do things I wouldn’t choose to do. Welcome to the real world, right? For example, on one project I worked on in the past, the connection string for an asp.net project used the “sa” account for sql server. Further, it was in the web.config file [...]

If you use NuGet, and only check-in your packages.config files to source control, then your source control repository will stay smaller, and checkout faster. Checking in binaries is usually a nice thing to avoid. However, you need new developers to be able to get those libraries locally easily, and to allow your build server (continuous [...]

I had to create a stored procedure to be called from NHibernate. You could use Session.Connection to execute with ADO.Net, but I like the idea of staying in NHibernate for consistency. Anyway, I found a lot of documentation on how to call one, but not with a parameter, so I thought I’d document that here. [...]

For .Net projects that have multiple developers, configuration differences can be a real problem. For this post, we’ll use the example of connection strings, but it could just as easily be a directory location, or some other difference. Let’s say that we have two developers, one is using SQL Server, while the other is using [...]

One or my recent projects was to work with a client to create a Silverlight control for reporting purposes that has some general flashiness, and is reusable across several sections of the site. It has brushed into some interesting areas. I have used Silverlight for some media and imaging applications before, but this was the [...]

When working with Silverlight, if you get an application code error 2103 and go looking for answers, you’ll find posts like this that suggest it’s a namespace problem. If that’s not the problem, you’ll find yourself stuck without many other suggestions. Here’s a simple check for another common problem, permissions to download the Silverlight xap. [...]

I’ve been reading Rocky Lhotka’s Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book. CSLA is a bit of a polarizing framework. A lot of comments on the book are along the lines of “outlived it’s usefulness given the current framework updates” or just generally “not keeping up with modern software trends.” It should also be noted that [...]

It’s surprising to me how many developers don’t understand the .Net type system. So I decided to write a series of posts on of some of the misconceptions. The “var” keyword, introduced in C# 3 is implicit typing. For all intents and purposes, this is the same as strong typing. It is strongly typed at [...]