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Developing software is HARD. In fact, I would say, it's very HARD. Patterns and Architectural Structures help, but... it’s still hard. Like any other architectural structures, MVVM is also a structure with a set of guidelines and NOT a set of rules. In the past few months, I came across various forums and online discussions, where people often ask "Why should I use MVVM? It seems like it complicates things" and I realized that MVVM is very difficult to learn for beginners who have very little knowledge of design patterns and frameworks. As of today, if you will search MVVM in any of the search engines, you will get lot many articles written by the extremely knowledgeable through to the novices, and it is really hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Apart from this, there are lot of resources which mention few points and miss out others, which may be very conflicting for those beginners as well as for some experienced programmers. I'm not going to call t...

Tech.Days Online – November 6-8: All the sessions and an interview with Steve Ballmer. Have you registered?   http://lnkd.in/bdera7q This three-day virtual event will be packed with technology updates by expert presenters from Microsoft (UK and Corporate), the Microsoft MVP Community, customers and special guests.

Although everyone puts their complete effort to develop the best software, sometimes bad things happen. But to be on safer side we can take some precautionary measures. Well, today I want to share some of the best practices which needs to be followed while dealing with any ORMs (Object Relational Models). Most of these are common among many of the relational databases. Exception handling: One should handle only those exceptions which need to be handled, and let all others pass through. For example, if you want to handle a connection issue you should do this by catching the specific exceptions, but don't use a catch all on Exceptions with the clause "just in case" because it may lead to high performance issues. USING: As many of us know, that USING automatically handles dispose functionality. But this statement doesn’t work all the time, especially in the case of database connections. If you want to try it out, then run some overnight processes using windows services....

It has been great movement, great work done by VS team for making easy to use Visual Studio. There has been lot of new features in Visual Studio 2013 preview, which has some very cool features in XAML, intellisence, goto definition and many more. But in RC, most of these features are extended. Today I'll try to cover as much as possible about all these new features. So, let's start by taking them one-by-one. 1)  Intellisence in XAML - Earlier versions of VS were pretty cool but I hope, whoever working in WPF would have surely miss intellisence feature. But in RC, that is no more a limitation. So, if we let editor know where the data is, it will help us out like a friend and will make our work easier. VS2013 rc supports intellisence for DataBinding and Resources . Let's have a look of this feature in below screen shot: I ntellisence for DataBinding    I ntellisence for Resources 2) Go To Definition in XAML - This new feature in available in VS2013 R...

Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate is available for download now. This release includes new tools for line of business applications, Web applications, games, mobile devices, services and of course applications targeting our latest platform Windows 8.1.   With the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) and Windows 8.1 RTM for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, developers now have everything they need to start building and testing  the next generation applications for the Windows Platform. More.. .

Recently I worked on a WPF application which supports localization using LocBAML tool. I created a sample application, having a very simple UI, consist of a button inside a window. Here I am assuming that most of you are aware on how to generate satellite assemblies. So, quickly coming to the point, when I build my application, build was successful. But when I launched, my application crashed with reason stated as IOException :( After spending almost an hour, I came to know that it was due to Culture settings. Let's have a look at my code first: Apart from this above code, I also updated my project file (.csproj) for development language so that my satellite assembly contains the neutral language resources. Following line was added in the project file: <UICulture>en-US</UICulture> Apart from this, I did nothing special in my app. After hitting my head on msdn, I got an idea on why culture changes was causing an exception. Well, n...

Reduce the data sent across the network  Reducing the amount of data sent across the network can improve application performance significantly. Compressing CSS and JavaScript is possible using bundling and minification. This will reduce the number of server requests and the amount of code sent across the wire.