The Missing Windows 8 Instructional Video

Scott Hanselman has produced an high quality video on YouTube.

The video is a nice and comprehensive introduction to Windows 8 for everyone (i.e. not geek only).

My experience with Windows 8 is that once you’ve figured out a few things (e.g. how to activate contextual Search), you can start appreciating the product.  Before that, it just looks...

Web Socket Protocol

Web Socket is a new protocol, standardised in RFC 6455, attempting to bring the best features of HTTP & TCP together.  More specifically, it aims at being Connected & full-duplex (as TCP), allowing server to call-back clients and universal (as HTTP).

This wasn’t done without pain.  Web Socket has a non-trivial handshake process, done over HTTP, after which the...

Agile Trade-offs

It was very refreshing to read Paul Dolman-Darrall’s article about the trade-offs to adopt in an agile delivery model.

Agile is more than 10 years old but still have whimsical attributes of a brand new artefact.  I believe this isn’t unique to agile but tend to be the case for any delivery methodology.  It seems that however how...

Entity Framework with Asynchronous behaviours

They finally did it:  the future release of Entity Framework (version 6) will sport asynchronous behaviour based on .NET 4.0 Task Parallel Library (TPL).

The API is pretty neat.  First the SaveChanges gets an async brother SaveChangesAsync returning a Task.  So we can now write things like:

await context.SavesChangesAsync();

The more complicated topic is the queries. ...

Unit Testing SharePoint

Doing automated unit tests in SharePoint isn’t easy.

As with all libraries that haven’t been designed with unit testing in mind, SharePoint object model doesn’t expose its dependencies:  it connects to a Content Database given the context creating it and there are no ways to redirect it to some stub implementations.

That is unless you can override method invocations.  This...