Working with dynamically loaded assemblies in a separate AppDomain is a powerful tool for protecting your execution context and creating a pluggable arcitecture. Brad Smith has written a great post on how to set it up using a generic architecture. There is one issue with the way he set it up for a project I have been involved in which resulted in us getting the dreaded remoting exception “Object: has been disconnected or does not exist […] Read more »
Mocking a LINQ Queryable Repository for TDD
Using ORM frameworks like Entity Framework and NHibernate has become standard practice for many developers. POCO using Entity Framework also supports test-driven-development nicely since we can create tests for our business domain objects without having a dependency on the repository used to store them. Entity Framework also supports LINQ queries which allows us to avoid defining every conceivable query necessary for our application ahead of time, instead letting the code that uses the domain objects construct a […] Read more »
WP7 Emulator No Go on Windows 8 inside Parallels 8
After a bunch of work trying to get the WP8 emulator running, and failing miserably, I set to work on trying to get a Windows 8 Parallels 8 environment set up for working with Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Phone 7.5. After hours of installing Visual Studio 2010, Service Packs, Microsoft Games for Windows (required by the SDK on Windows 8?!), WP SDK 7.1 and the WP SDK 7.1.1 update I was finally ready to […] Read more »
6 Steps To Get Entity Framework 5 Working with MySql 5.5
After much battling with configuration and such I have finally managed to get EF5 Code First and MySql 5 working together using the Oracle/MySql .NET Connector 6.5.4 or the official Connector version 6.6.4. This configuration does not currently support Migrations. The steps are as follows: Grab EF 5 from NuGet Grab MySql.Data and MySql.Data.Entity from NuGet (6.5.4) or MySql (6.6.4) Configure a MySql Data Provider Configure a MySql Connection String Create a Custom MySql Database […] Read more »
Using MySql 5 as Membership Backend for ASP.NET 4.5 MVC 4 Application
Oracle provide MySql ASP.Net web providers through NuGet – search for MySql.Web. Using the MySql providers you can easily use MySql as your membership/profile/role backend for an ASP.Net application. But beware the MySql providers do not currently support the ASP.NET 4.5 templates since those templates use ExtendedMembershipProvider and SimpleMembershipProvider and they have an internal dependency on MS SQL Server… I am going to demonstrate using it as the membership provider for an MVC 4 application […] Read more »
Using NuGet and Git Together
Just had to setup a new project with NuGet packages using Git as source control. In order to set this up properly you need to add #Nuget packages/ to your .gitignore file so that all the binaries, configs and what ever other resources the NuGet packages contain don’t get committed to your repository. This can significantly speed up push and pull requests between repositories with .NET code since you can exclude many megabytes of unnecessary synchronisation and rely […] Read more »
Windows Phone 7 Emulator Running on Parallels
I have previously not managed to get the Windows Phone 7 emulator running on my dev install (Windows 7 on Parallels 7). After upgrading to Parallels 8, installing the latest Parallels update for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 7.1.1 SDK update. I have managed to get it working a little more. It still takes ages to startup: 2-3 minutes of “Windows Emulator is doing a full OS boot” before the Windows Phone logo shows […] Read more »
Windows Phone 8 Emulator May Work in VMWare Fusion
So after trying to get my MacBook Pro up and running as a dev machine for Windows Phone 8, both using Parallels 8 (which is my standard VM environment) and Bootcamp, I have resorted to using a Sony Vaio instead. My current MacBook is dead-in-the water as a fully working WP8 dev machine. The final knockout blow was when I realised that the WP8 emulator requires hardware-assisted virtualisation using SLAT and that my 2009 MacBook […] Read more »
Windows Phone 8 Emulator on MacBook Pro – No SLAT
Trying desperately to try out the Windows Phone 8 emulator… I am running a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The WP8 emulator requires Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V requires that the processor supports virtualization through Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Intel Core i5 &, i7 should support it so a newer MacBook Pro might work, but for me that makes it impossible to run the WP8 emulator […] Read more »
Windows Phone 8 SDK on Mac OSX Parallels 8
Bad news for all us developers who use virtual machines to develop Windows software. The new WP8 emulator is a Hyper-V machine and will only run on non virtualised hosts. So my Mac OSX Parallels 8 dev setup with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 installed in a virtual machine will allow me to install the Windows Phone 8 SDK and all the tools but the phone emulator will not start. As far as I […] Read more »