ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence

I found this very long article/letter written by some people who don’t seem to like Microsoft’s Entity Framework very much. They have some very interesting concerns about where things are headed and how ORM mappers should really work and be used.

The opposite of Nullable types

Recently I found myself needing (or just wanting) something that would do the opposite of what ? does to make types nullable. Most developers have used nullable types at some point since you can’t assign null values to primitive types such as int and double.
So how do you do the opposite? What if I want [...]

Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 3 Mapping

OK, so if you followed the previous two tutorials, you should have a decent heat map going. Now, that will work just fine if you are using it by itself, but what if the data behind it is geographic and you want to layer your heatmap over a map of say, the US? If that’s [...]

Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 2 Adding Color

This is part 2 of my heatmap tutorial for WPF using C#. I’m going to explain how to color the mask that we created in the first part of the tutorial. To do this, we will need to create a gradient and then replace the colors one by one. Surprisingly, (to me at least) this [...]

Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 1 The Mask

I found myself with a little extra time at work and decided to look into a side project I had been thinking of for a while. It’s not really anything that helps the business but it’s a neat visualization of our data - a heatmap. Heatmaps are one way to visualize 3 dimensional data - [...]

Bug Labs

When I was a kid I loved playing with Legos. Ok, I still do. I loved being able to create anything I wanted. It was the ultimate toy for me because I could make something new every day. Well, that passion for creating things eventually shifted to software development when my dad sat me down [...]

WPF Tutorial: Dependency Properties

Hello all, I know I’ve been away for a bit but now I’m back with a sweet coding tutorial. I’ve been doing a lot of WPF lately for my current job at InterKnowlogy, so I decided to write up a quick overview of two new and very important UI features of .NET 3.5 called Dependency [...]

Viewing Context

When I was working on my most recent social networking project, we introduced an interest construct that we began referring to as the “Viewing Context”. Before explaining what this was used for, I’ll further explain the construct.

Distributed Observer Pattern

While I was on the train coming home from work an interesting idea hit me while I was trying to solve a very common problem. In general, the problem is that the web sucks. But, I think I found an interesting solution.

Spatial Databases

This morning I discovered the concept of Spatial Databases while researching a few things for my GPS tracking side project using a new Utah based service. I’m not sure how I missed this until now because it seems to be a hot topic among those involved with any sort of GIS (geographic information system) application.
Recently [...]