Community developer blogs

Simon Evans' Blog

Recent Posts

• ADO.NET Data Services : Diagnosing problems with your data service

  Posted: 17 Mar 2009 at 17:37 by simon.evans

  ADO.NET Data Services is elegant technology that feels very easy to work with. The majority of current scenarios for using ADO.NET Data Services involve exposing an Entity Data Model (EDM) implemented using the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Most of the time, this just works, but it can throw you when you do face problems; how exactly do you diagnose issues in data services, either at design time or in production? In this blog post I will cover a common check list that should be followed when things

• Choosing An Appropriate Technology For Accessing Data In .NET Solutions

  Posted: 24 Feb 2009 at 05:59 by simon.evans

  Introduction The data access wars are over; long live the ORM wars. The new battles are fought with even more fanatical zealous behaviour than in previous conflicts. Rather than just debating the pros and cons of how best to execute SQL and wire it into our objects, there is now a whole new dimension to developer’s polarized opinions; what is the best ORM to use, if you believe you should use one at all that is. The objective of any ORM is to bridge the object-relational impedance mismatch that

• Choosing An Appropriate Technology For Accessing Data In .NET Solutions

  Posted: 25 Jan 2009 at 23:54 by simon.evans

  Introduction The data access wars are over; long live the ORM wars. The new battles are fought with even more fanatical zealous behaviour than in previous conflicts. Rather than just debating the pros and cons of how best to execute SQL and wire it into our objects, there is now a whole new dimension to developer’s polarized opinions; what is the best ORM to use, if you believe you should use one at all that is. The objective of any ORM is to bridge the object-relational impedance mismatch that

• ADO.NET Data Services : Addressing Design Guidelines

  Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 20:25

  One criticism I have heard placed at the door of ADO.NET Data Services is that it does not provide control over the syntax and design of the URI addresses that represent the resources you are surfacing through a data service. While it is true that there are limits to the control developers have over

• Guidelines for Consuming a Service Using a WCF Proxy

  Posted: 10 Nov 2008 at 23:04

  This is a blog I've been meaning to write for over a year now, but have just not had the time. Its as much a "note to self" as a blog for external consumption. WCF provides the ability to generate a client proxy that communicates with a service, such as a SOAP service conforming to basic profile. Ge

• PDC08 : One week on

  Posted: 06 Nov 2008 at 21:24

  PDC went by in a flash. Of all the conferences I've ever had the privilege to attend, it was by far the most intense, in terms of hours, subject matter and variety of new software to consider. For all of these reasons, I chose not to blog whilst I was there. I wanted to chew on what I had seen befor

• Pro ADO.NET Data Services : Working with RESTful Data

  Posted: 26 Oct 2008 at 23:03

  It's been a long time since I last wrote a blog post; around six months to be exact. It's not that I have not been busy writing though. In April I began embarking on one of the hardest things I've ever done; writing a book with my co-author John Shaw. And now for a brief advertisement; the book is c

• Issues using Visual Studio 2008 with XML Spy integration

  Posted: 11 Mar 2008 at 21:12 by simon.evans

  Today I spent several hours of my life trying to figure out what had broken the design view and CSS features of web pages in my installation of Visual Studio 2008. After a process of elimination, starting with uninstalling the Silverlight 2.0 SDK bits off my machine, I found that the culprit for ren

• Consuming Services Using Silverlight 2.0

  Posted: 06 Mar 2008 at 20:15 by simon.evans

  I never really got that excited about Silverlight 1.0, mainly because whilst it had a great core graphics engine and did video streaming very well, it's feature set was just not rich enough to make it really useful to applications that demanded deep functionality. One of the features that was clearl

• Consuming JSON enabled WCF 3.5 services using ASP.net AJAX

  Posted: 06 Mar 2008 at 06:03 by simon.evans

  There are several blog posts out there that cover the subject of how to consume JSON enabled services from Javascript using ASP.net AJAX. Having scouted around the usual suspects, I think the best article is by Fritz Onion here: http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/fritz/archive/2008/01/31/50121.aspx Th

• LINQ to SQL: Let the debate begin

  Posted: 11 Nov 2007 at 14:15 by simon.evans

  So I just got back from TechEd Barcelona, and I had a great conference in no small part due to the people I went with: Merrick Chaffer, James Dawson and Paul McMillan. This is a selection of some of Conchango's finest from the world of .Net development, infrastructure and SQL Server. One of the

• Dealing with Message Ordering in Service Orientated Architectures

  Posted: 10 Oct 2007 at 15:26 by simon.evans

  Message ordering is a key concept in a service orientated architecture. It is a key concept, because one of the core tenets of SOA is that a service must remain autonomous. In remaining autonomous, a service must be able to deal with any unexpected circumstance of messages sent to it, including the

• Dealing with Message Ordering in Service Orientated Architectures

  Posted: 10 Oct 2007 at 15:26 by simon.evans

  Message ordering is a key concept in a service orientated architecture. It is a key concept, because one of the core tenets of SOA is that a service must remain autonomous. In remaining autonomous, a service must be able to deal with any unexpected circumstance of messages sent to it, including the

• A comprehensive guide to using MsmqIntegrationBinding with MSMQ 3.0 in WCF

  Posted: 17 Sep 2007 at 13:52 by simon.evans

  Overview of WCF architecture Figure 1 illustrates the generic architecture WCF employs for all services. Figure 1 - General WCF Architecture The outer service represents the AppDomain of the service. A WCF service consists of contracts (data, fault and service contracts), a service instance (impleme

• A comprehensive guide to using MsmqIntegrationBinding with MSMQ 3.0 in WCF

  Posted: 17 Sep 2007 at 13:52 by simon.evans

  Overview of WCF architecture Figure 1 illustrates the generic architecture WCF employs for all services. Figure 1 - General WCF Architecture The outer service represents the AppDomain of the service. A WCF service consists of contracts (data, fault and service contracts), a service instance (impleme

• WCF serialization with MSMQ

  Posted: 14 May 2007 at 17:03 by simon.evans

  By default, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) uses the DataContractSerializer to serialize and deserialize XML in a service, but this serialization mechanism can be replaced to use the XmlSerializer. The following article on MSDN covers this in more detail: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/libr

• WCF serialization with MSMQ

  Posted: 14 May 2007 at 17:03 by simon.evans

  By default, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) uses the DataContractSerializer to serialize and deserialize XML in a service, but this serialization mechanism can be replaced to use the XmlSerializer. The following article on MSDN covers this in more detail: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/libr

• WCF Contract Design Guidelines

  Posted: 22 Apr 2007 at 22:10 by simon.evans

  Here at Conchango we have community days every six weeks where we get together to discuss common work interests. As a .Net Architect, one of the core communities I participate in is the .Net community. At our last community day, I presented on Windows Communication Foundation, a technology I have be

• WCF Contract Design Guidelines

  Posted: 22 Apr 2007 at 22:10 by simon.evans

  Here at Conchango we have community days every six weeks where we get together to discuss common work interests. As a .Net Architect, one of the core communities I participate in is the .Net community. At our last community day, I presented on Windows Communication Foundation, a technology I have be

• Architecting web sites using Microsoft ASP.net AJAX

  Posted: 09 Mar 2007 at 13:55 by simon.evans

  Last Tuesday I conducted a presentation at the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference entitled "Architecting web sites using Microsoft ASP.net AJAX". You can download the presentation below. The aim of the presentation was to get attendees thinking about how they choose to architect aspect