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The Entity Framework together with LINQ to Entities are very powerful technologies to access and manipulate data from a database. But when you need to gain performance or need extra security, stored procedures and user defined functions are often required. In this first article in a series of three I will focus on how to use stored procedures in the Entity Framework 4.0.
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2010-08-30 - English - .NET, Entity Framework, Database
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Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. In this article I will focus on the new design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features. more
2010-01-17 - English - .NET, Silverlight
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Silverlight and RIA Services are great technologies and the Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a nice approach to keep UI and logic separated. But using the combination of view models with item controls, dataforms and commands can be a laborious task because the databinding features in Silverlight are quite limited. In this article I will demonstrate how binding with ViewModels can be improved by using the BindingHelper class and by creating your own command behaviors. more
2009-08-23 - English - .NET, Silverlight
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A few months ago Microsoft released the first preview of .NET RIA Services. This new framework promises to simplify building n-tier Line of Business (LoB) applications by providing patterns, components and tools to build services, query data, handle CRUD operations, resolve concurrency, manage data validation, ... In this first article I will focus on the current limitations and I will offer you some of my workarounds and tips. more
2009-05-17 - English - .NET, RIA Services, Silverlight
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LINQPad was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it is a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer. Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework data models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL. In this small article I will highlight some of the new features. more
2009-04-14 - English - .NET, LINQPad, LINQ, Entity Framework
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A common problem when developing Silverlight applications is how to share classes and in particular (Entity Framework) entities which are compiled for the full .NET framework in a Silverlight application. Silverlight is a browser plugin and a subset of the full .NET framework. Therefore Visual Studio does not allow referencing .NET assemblies from your Silverlight application. In this article I will demonstrate a very simple technique to share source code and it will give several real world examples and some handy tips. more
2009-01-27 - English - .NET, Silverlight, Entity Framework, WCF
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This small article contains a few C# scripts which can be executed in LINQPad to clean up and organize Outlook mailboxes. If you want to keep Outlook performing as fast as possible and to reduce the size of mailboxes then these scripts and my OutlookProvider component can simplify this job. more
2009-01-24 - English - .NET, Office, Outlook, LINQ, LINQPad
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In addition to my article about querying the metadata of the ADO.NET Entity Framework I have implemented several extension methods that utilize this metadata. This article will describe a set of extension methods which can be used to extend the standard Entity Framework classes (ObjectQuery, EntityObject, ObjectStateManager, ...). more
2009-01-12 - English - .NET, Entity Framework
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A while ago I was looking for a way to query Excel with LINQ. I needed a simple solution that allowed me to query tables in Excel worksheets in a tool like LINQPad. This article will describe how I implemented my ExcelProvider and it will demonstrate its features by giving an example of a LINQ query and the result in LINQPad. more
2008-12-17 - English - .NET, Office, Excel, LINQ, LINQPad
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A few months ago I posted several articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework beta 3. In the meanwhile the Entity Framework has been officially released and a lot of resources about this technology have become available. In the last few weeks I have been taking a closer look at the metadata services. This article will demonstrate 20 examples which use LINQ to query the metadata collections of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. These queries can be used to examine the structure of your Entity Data Model or to get statistics about it. more
2008-12-02 - English - .NET, Entity Framework
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A few months ago I published an article about my LINQ AsHierarchy extension method. This extension method can be used to convert a flat collection of records to a hierarchical structure of nested collections. I got a lot of enthusiastic responses and questions so I decided to improve this technique a little further. This new article will describe the new features and demonstrates how to use the LINQ to Objects and the new LINQ to SQL AsHierarchy extension methods. more
2008-08-25 - English - .NET, LINQ, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL
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Data binding is one of the most powerful features of WPF/Silverlight. It allows developers to achieve more with less code. However, when building user interfaces with WPF/Silverlight, you often need to create your own value converters. A common mistake is to implement custom value converters for each and every binding that requires one. Of course value converters can be generalized an re-used. In this article I will show you the source code of my library of generic custom value converters and I will demonstrate in which scenarios you can use them. more
2008-07-17 - English - .NET, WPF, Silverlight
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This article will demonstrate how to use the Google Maps HTTP geocoding service and how to handle REST services and XML in general. The Google Maps service can be used to retrieve the latitude, longitude and a lot of other geographical data from a given address. more
2008-06-20 - English - .NET, GIS/Geocoding
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WPF UIAutomation is a framework from Microsoft to automate Windows applications. In this article I will demonstrate a lot of features (invoking button clicks, focusing controls, entering data, sending keystrokes, subscribing to events, ...) and compare it with the open-source project White. more
2008-06-06 - English - .NET, UI Automation, WPF, WinForms
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This short article covers the most important features of the open-source White framework and the Microsoft UISpy tool. White can be used for UI automation and my C# .NET application demonstrates how to automate the Windows calculator by sending keystrokes, clicking on buttons and menus, pressing function keys, accessing textboxes, ... more
2008-05-04 - English - .NET, UI Automation, WPF, WinForms
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This article explains how to convert data from a self referencing table (adjacency model) to a hierarchy of nested collections (nested set model). The new LINQ AsHierarchy() extension method can be used to convert data and bind it to WPF TreeViews. more
2008-03-29 - English - .NET, LINQ, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL
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This small article about the Windows Presentation Foundation will demonstrate how to use a WPF ProcessingControl and a BackgroundWorker thread to create responsive user interfaces and how to give visual feedback about the progress. more
2008-03-11 - English - .NET, WPF
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In this third part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework I will demonstrate how to add and modify data, use change tracking and handle concurrency conflicts. I have also implemented a Dump() extension method which can be useful for displaying all change tracking information. more
2008-02-25 - English - .NET, Entity Framework
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A new version of the open-source PowerToys for the Class Designer and Distributed System Designer has been released. These add-ins provides additional functionality for the Visual Studio Class Designer, such as HTML/XML export, new creation commands, filtering commands, formatting commands, a pan/zoom window, a documentation window, a floating properties window, ... This small post describes how to install it and shows a screenshot which highlights almost all features. more
2008-02-23 - English - .NET, Visual Studio, Tools
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This post briefly describes how to integrate a WPF user control in a Windows Forms application. It also provides a workaround to solve the background color problem of the ElementHost class. This workaround will demonstrate how you can map properties between Windows Forms controls and WPF UI elements. more
2008-02-21 - English - .NET, WPF, WinForms
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Second part of my series of articles about the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This article covers a few handy testing and learning tools like eSqlBlast and LINQPad. It also describes a few techniques on how to view the generated T-SQL statements when executing Entity SQL or LINQ to Entities queries. more
2008-02-06 - English - .NET, Entity Framework, LINQPad
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A few weeks ago Microsoft released Beta 3 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF). The Entity Framework looks like an interesting technology which is more powerful and advanced than LINQ to SQL. I have created a small tutorial on how to start with the Entity Framework using the Northwind sample database. This first article covers the Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. I will try to compare EF to LINQ to SQL if possible. more
2008-01-28 - English - .NET, Entity Framework
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Fourth part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article shows the features of the 2 provided visualizers (LINQ to SQL Visualizer & Expression Tree Visualizer), the use of the Refresh method and how to create dynamic strong-typed Where- and OrderBy-clauses. Powerful expression trees can be created easily by using the PredicateBuilder class. more
2008-01-07 - English - .NET, LINQ to SQL
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Last week version 4 of the Mole Visualizer for Visual Studio was released. Mole is a great visualizer while debugging WPF, WinForms and WCF applications. Mole does not only allow you to view objects and data, it also allows you to drill into properties and child objects. A lot of properties can be modified and the result is displayed in a live preview. more
2008-01-04 - English - .NET, Visual Studio, Tools
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A few examples about .NET WPF applications using LINQ to SQL. This article will describe how to create nice looking treeviews which are populated with data using LINQ to SQL (or LINQ to Entities). Of course resources, templates, styles, datatriggers, value converters, ... will be utilized. Most examples will also work with Silverlight. more
2007-12-22 - English - .NET, WPF, Silverlight, LINQ to SQL
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First tests with the Community Tech Preview of the Parallel Extensions for .NET 3.5. A comparison between sequential and parallel execution is made on the basis of charts. PLINQ and the ParallelTask Library can surely improve the performance of .NET applications. more
2007-12-14 - English - .NET, LINQ
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In this article I will show you how to create a ValueConverter class which can be used in a WPF application to display the pictures of the Outlook contacts. more
2007-12-08 - English - .NET, Office, Outlook, LINQ, WPF
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This short article is an addition to my 'Querying Outlook and OneNote with LINQ' article. It describes how you can utilize the free LINQPad tool to execute queries on Office data. more
2007-11-25 - English - .NET, Office, Outlook, OneNote, LINQ, LINQPad
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In this article I will describe how I developed two wrapper classes for Outlook and OneNote. These classes can be used to execute LINQ to Objects (.NET 3.5) queries on emails, appointments, tasks, contacts, notebooks, sections, pages, ... So you could call it LINQ to Outlook and LINQ to OneNote. more
2007-11-14 - English - .NET, Office, Outlook, OneNote, LINQ
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Third part of this series of articles about LINQ to SQL (.NET 3.5). This article includes some useful tips about adding sequences and using variables in a LINQ query. Further more the techniques of eager loading and query compiling are covered. more
2007-11-04 - English - .NET, LINQ to SQL
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An article about LINQ to SQL with examples of how to use the LINQPad tool and how to implement inheritance with LINQ. more
2007-09-09 - English - .NET, LINQ to SQL, LINQPad
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An article about LINQ to SQL (Visual Studio 2008 bčta 2) with a lot of code examples using the Northwind database. Following topics are being covered : querying, view entities, view SQL statements, local data shaping, non-mapped properties in partial entity classes, object Relation Diagram versus Class Diagram, data shaping with non-mapped properties, change tracking, bulk operations. more
2007-08-30 - English - .NET, LINQ to SQL
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Overview of all kinds of interesting freeware and open source developer tools, plugins and components for Delphi and .NET (GExperts, DDevExtensions, CFBH, MemProof, GPProfiler, FastMM, JEDI, WinSpector, Yapp, SourceMonitor, LINQ for SQL Visualizer, Cache Visualizer, Reflector, Resourcer, Managed Spy, Snippet Compiler, FxCop, NUnit & DUnit, ColorPic, ...) more
2007-04-18 - English - Tools, Delphi, .NET
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Overview of all VisualStyleElements (XP theme elements) which can be used when drawing on a GDI+ drawing surface. more
2006-12-31 - English - .NET, WinForms
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Delphi and C# .NET examples how to add files to the 'recent files' menu or how to clear this part of the Start menu. more
2006-10-22 - Dutch - .NET, Delphi
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This article 'Developing Pocket PC applications with Delphi 2006' has been published on the CodeGear (Borland) Developer Network website on July 5th 2006. It describes the differences between the .NET and the .NET Compact Framework, how to utilize the Windows Mobile emulators and how using the CFBH tool and the Oosterkamp Class Helpers can make it a lot easier to develop Pocket PC applications with Delphi. more
2006-07-07 - English - .NET, Delphi, Compact Framework
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Presentation about the Delphi TscExcelExport component. This TscExcelExport component is an advanced, powerful but easy to use component which enables you to export all records of a dataset from Borland/Codegear Delphi to Microsoft Excel. Many features are provided to change the layout, use conditional formatting, add totals, create groups, set a filter, ... more
 (PDF) - 2006-04-01 - English - .NET, Delphi
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This article describes the preview version of the Borland Delphi for .NET CF compiler. The preview of this compiler can be used by Delphi developers in exploring the world of the .NET Compact Framework on Pocket PC's or Smartphones. A lot of controls and how to use them, the emulators and several tools will be demonstrated. more
2005-09-11 - English - .NET, Delphi, Compact Framework
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