This issue of CODE Magazine features a number of articles on Service and Server technologies, including REST, Twitter Programming, Entity Framework 4, Windows Azure, and more. As always, the issue also features other .NET programming topics.
Our industry is constantly changing. So much so, that it is difficult to keep up sometimes.
Whenever you create a new SharePoint website, one of the questions SharePoint asks you is to select an authentication mechanism. Should it be NTLM or should it be Kerberos?The first time I installed SharePoint, I picked Kerberos, because it sounded like a tropical fruit, only to be prompted that this will need more work! Given that I’m the laziest person you know, I changed my selection to NTLM, and went with the less naggy version instead!
SQL Server 2008 has been out for more than a year, and perhaps an overview and assessment is due. From a database administrator’s point of view, what features are standing the test of time?
Along with an easy site with which you can access your account, there are many really cool Twitter clients out there. This is thanks to an exposed API that you can use to access all of Twitter’s features. The great thing is that this API uses a technology that WCF has embraced completely; I’m talking about REST. Though you can certainly use straight network programming to access and update your Twitter account, why not use the technology that Microsoft has put all their eggs into as far as communications programming is concerned? Twitter is, after all, all about communicating, right?
We’ve all heard that version 3 of a Microsoft product is when that product really hits its stride.And while I’m not sure of the truth of that software urban legend, I do have to say that Microsoft, with the release of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (which happens to be its 3rd major version), has released a gem of a reporting solution that is sure to please users of prior versions and bring more converts into the Reporting Services fold. The newest version of SQL Server Reporting Services is faster, can handle larger reports, supports a wider variety of browsers, and is more flexible thanks to the new Tablix data region, support for rich text content, and Microsoft Word as an output format.
If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.
Delivering applications and services that are highly available is expensive.
In Show #449 we spoke to Niklas Gustafsson and Josh Phillips about Axum, a new language developed specifically for parallelism.
Writing software is hard, particularly when the schedules keep programmers “nose to the grindstone.” Every so often, it’s important to take a breather and look around the world and discover what we can find-what we find can often help us write software better.Philosophy seems a strange partner to the software craftsman, but ironically a brief dip in the waters of abstract thought will help hone skills later useful to the craft of code, models, and workable software.