Workflow + Portable Class Library (PCL) == No Intellisense In Visual Studio 2012-2013 (with fix!)

A few months ago I decided I wanted to bring some Reactive Extensions (Rx) awesomeness into some of my custom workflow activities. So, as any good .NET dev would do, I fired up the Package Manager Console and typed Install-Package Rx-Main and it installed Rx 2.1 for me. Then I started leveraging Rx APIs in […]

Full Expression Tree Support Coming in .NET/C# 4.0

Yesssssssss! I’ve been waiting and hoping that this was coming in 4.0 and now it’s official: Full Expression Tree Support. This seems like a HUGE step forward to me. With the advent of this feature, one can finally implement support for converting an expression written in C# to something that runs on the GPU. For […]

JIT’d JavaScript is all the rage and Microsoft dropped the ball again

There’s a lot of buzz lately about browsers finally getting JIT’d JavaScript. First it was SquirrelFish in WebKit, then FireFox let the cat out of the bag about their implementation called TraceMonkey  and then Google came out with V8 when they unleashed Chrome on the world. Kudos to all of those teams for pushing performance […]

Velocity Cache API needs TryGetValue

Ok, I’ve just started working with Microsoft’s Distributed Caching API (aka “Velocity”) and while I’m very happy with the features thus far (can’t wait for notifications!), I really think the API needs a TryGetValue method. Right now you have the Get, GetAndLock and GetIfNewer methods and all of those return type Object. My suggestion is […]

ScriptReferences to ScriptResource.axd for GAC’d assemblies are problematic in server farms

Ok, I just discovered a nasty little problem with ScriptReferences to script files that are embedded in assemblies that are installed in the GAC… starting with System.Web.Extensions itself. First, in case you’re not already familiar with this subject, the way scripts are referenced when they are embedded into assemblies is by building a URL to […]

ADO.NET Entity Framework’s CompiledQuery when using anonymous projections shows why C# needs “mumble” types

Ok, that’s a really long title for a post, so what the heck do I mean by all that? Well, I’ve started working with the CompiledQuery class and I’ve run into a language limitation problem that almost makes any kind of performance gain I might get from CompiledQuery not worthwhile when using projections due to […]

A post on Silverlight 2’s layout and rendering

I just wanted to link to this great post on Silverlight 2’s layout and rendering features. Both features borrow heavily from WPF, but there are also important differences. For one, unlike WPF, there is only one tree… no Logical vs. Visual. Also very cool mention of Silverlight 2’s rendering internals being many-core friendly so it […]