Visual Studio 2008 introduced us database projects. These projects are also present in Visual Studio 2010. I noticed some differences already when building my photo gallery application. Let’s see how these projects work under Visual Studio 2010.

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin describes how to write software using C#. Book covers also most important design patterns and object-oriented development principles. There are very good, close to reality examples for every topic and that makes this book pretty easy to read and understand.

Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Michael A. Banks is book that every blogger should read. It is not another book that is just somehow covering popular topic and makes easy money to author. I think this is serious book, really.

I am writing simple ASP.NET MVC system that I plan to publish with source code pretty soon. I needed some simple calendar component that doesn’t require ASP.NET server-side form to work. I found different JavaScript based calendars and only one pretty oldcalendar that was specially written for ASP.NET MVC. I updated it and here is the source and binary downloads for Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

There is new project in CodePlex called OpenForum. With source code you get also some samples you can run on your machine. OpenForum is pretty new and simple. There are no advanced forum features and currently it is suitable for smaller forums. You can change the look of OpenForum and write your own user repositories. Let’s see how OpenForum looks like.

Today I tried to write my first unit tests under Visual Studio 2010. Just to see if Visual Studio testing system can now also be used for unit tests. Visual Studio 2008 had some annoying problems with test and I preferred to use nUnit instead. Visual Studio 2010 brings some good news – tests work. Take a look at my example.

Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models is another create patterns book by Martin Fowler. The audience of this book are analysts whose work is analysis of information systems and modeling data structures. This book is also recommended reading for programmers and software designers.

I needed to attach SQL Server 2008 database to server. There was no log file, just mdf. I don’t know why but it is not very easy to get this database online. After some digging in internet I found solution.

ASP.NET pages that use AJAX components make usually many requests to server per one page to load all required JavaScript and CSS files. Connections, like all other real time resources, are most expensive to create and keep. If we can somehow decrease the number of requests per page load then we need less server resources for same amount of users. For ASP.NET forms we can use script combining, for ASP.NET MVC applications we can use ASP.NET MVC Client-side Resource Combine.

.Net Framework 4.0 introduces memory mapped files. Memory mapped files are useful when you need to do in-memory data manipulation and your data structures are large. For large in-memory data the performance of memory mapped file is the best. It is much faster thanMemoryStream. And like files on hard disc, memory mapped files can be shared between different programs. MemoryMappedFile and other classes for memory mapped files can be found from System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles namespace.