Microsoft created the .NET Framework for many of us to write better software that ran on Windows. I’ve spent a good portion of my time developing with .NET Framework code, writing code that ran in web browsers. So ironically, the code did run on a variety of platforms. And with Mono, there was always a…
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Much of our programming model is based upon the simple concept of putting data into a variable. This sort of programming typically goes by the term “imperative programming”. We are issuing a series of commands; the computer executes the commands. These commands typically are run in some very predictable order. Early programming languages even had…
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CouchDB is a NoSQL database solution, which means it supports persistence of data. But you don’t have to spend a lot of time designing the relational structure upfront. This makes starting development with a NoSQL system easier than typical SQL databases because you don’t have to spend time defining relationships. Also, many NoSQL solutions favor…
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.NET Framework 4, in some ways, is “the” .NET. This is when .NET felt like a super solid platform that didn’t need anything else. It was great. Ironically, I don’t think .NET 4 added much over .NET 3.5, but it felt like a clean solution was fully brought together. It was released alongside Visual Studio…
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SqlConnection, SqlCommand, SqlDataReader, and SqlDataAdapter are classes we were very familiar with in 2008. If you wanted to write a database query, you were probably using a combination of these classes. Things changed in 2008 with the release of .NET 3.5 SP1, giving .NET a Microsoft-provided Object-Relational Mapping (ORM). A lack of ORM was becoming…
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We have covered a lot of history in this series so far. We have covered many incremental improvements to C# and .NET. Things such as Auto-Implemented Properties were improvements, but they felt like incremental improvements to the language (although I think that one notable exception would be the addition of Lambda expressions). LINQ wasn’t a…
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.NET 3 was a pretty big change, maybe the most significant change since the creation of Microsoft .NET Framework. It was fundamentally changed in ways that brought in many amazing features into the language. Here I will cover WPF, WF, WCF, and Auto-Implemented Properties. The first change was WPF, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation….
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When .NET Framework 2.0 was initially released, I was working on a .NET Framework 1.1 project that was becoming a bit of a pain. Moving to 2.0 seemed like just the thing the project (and I) needed. The addition of support for generics in 2.0 was a win in and of itself, but also adding…
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When you’ve been writing software as long as I have, it’s fun to look back at how far technology has advanced throughout your career. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about C and .NET, and basically the whole Microsoft stack. This led me down the rabbit hole of reading and remembering (and sometimes finding out…
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2021 marks the 50th anniversary of that ubiquitous technology we love to hate: email. And while it’s a nuisance for many of us, I believe we’d be lost without it. Originally known as electronic mail when it was developed in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, email was created as a way for ARPANET users to send…
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