Peter Shaw

The last time, we saw how to authenticate to a Microsoft Live OneDrive account from within a standard Windows forms application. This time, we continue on from that previous post and create routines to make working with the file list much more friendly, followed by showing how to upload and download files from the account. […]

If there’s one stick the ASP.NET MVC crowd loves to rattle when comparing MVC and webforms, it’s the restful/friendly URL one. From the get go, ASP.NET MVC is designed to handle URLs that are detached from the page or resource to which they are tied. The types of URLs that I’m talking about are the […]

Hands up. How many of you use ‘List’ on a regular basis? If the core software you write consists mostly of lines of business apps, then I’m sure like me, quite a lot of you do. But, did you ever stop to thoroughly explore some of the more esoteric types that are available in the […]

This article was going to be a follow-up for my previous article on Entity Framework Code First Simplicity. What I was actually going to cover was how to take the code-first model that I introduced in the last post, and show you how to make it work with SQLite and Postgres, to give you some […]

Ok, so you’ve heard all about Entity Framework (EF), and about how marvelous it is, so you’ve gotten all fired up about it, and thought woo, yea! Time for me to get my EF hat on. Then you start reading the docs, and looking at the examples, and suddenly the realization sinks in. None of […]

In today’s world of mobile apps, it’s not an unreasonable expectation to want a database that’s small, lightweight, and travels with the app from device to device. In some cases, it’s even a requirement for a server based system, where for various reasons you may not be able to install a full scale DBMS such […]

Hands up; how many of you have only really ever used LINQ for database access? How many of you only ever really believed it was for database access? Well it’s not, it’s potentially very useful in all manner of scenarios. In this post, I’m going to go over a quick refresher about just what it […]

Those of you who know what lies behind frameworks such as ‘Entity Framework’ and ‘N-Hibernate’ will undoubtedly be going ‘Why’?  For those of you who don’t, well… stay tuned, this might get just a little bit interesting. With all the ORMs floating about today, the modern day .NET developer is spoiled for choice. You have […]

The original subject behind this month’s article, was going to be “Cross Platform C#”, however, during the course of sketching it out, I realized that there wasn’t really enough material to do the actual article I wanted to do. You see, last time I actually had to port any C# code to a system other […]

How many times have you needed to create a backend service to support your latest web project? For many people, the answer to this is, quite a few! So how do you go about doing that then? To build a new service, you can start a new windows service project in Visual Studio. Of course, […]

Many times in an application, you need to generate a unique ID. In a previous article I discussed generating a fingerprint for the purposes of identifying a web or network client of our application. Today, I’ll go one step further and show methods for generating a unique ID so that your application can identify itself. […]

Hands up, how many of you create monster functions and methods in your projects? And no, I’m not on about routines that are a million lines long, what did you think I meant? I’m actually talking about those functions that have signatures that could easily span over two lines if word wrap were turned on. […]