April 15, 2006

Using the Ajax.NET Framework

he Ajax.NET Framework presents a remarkably easy-to-use framework that will simplify Ajax development and allow developers to spend more time on implementation details and less time on parsing XML. If Ajax is still a new concept for you, Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The “XML” part of Ajax

Moving and Downsizing

must confess, 2005 was an odd year. Perhaps you remember a column a few months back, describing the wretched flight with four cats and an ill seatmate, moving the household from from the left coast to the right. One cross-country move in a lifetime should be enough for anyone; for

Developer’s Toolkit

ast month I had some developers over to my office house to do a code review of a project they had developed for a client. During the review one of the developers took a walk over to my bookshelf and seemed amazed at the collection of development books there. I

Bloated Designs, Over-Architecting, and Refactoring

ome time ago, I posted a blog entry entitled, “Refactor as you Develop.” I did so because a buddy of mine out in Chicago was stuck in Refactor hell, as he put it. Now, Eric (my buddy’s name) and I share a lot of design ideas and techniques so I

Heard on .NET Rocks!: A Torrent of Cool

am the host of “.NET Rocks!”, an Internet audio talk show for .NET developers online at www.dotnetrocks.com and msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks . My co-host Richard Campbell and I interview the movers and shakers in the .NET community. We now have over 160 shows archived online, and we publish a new show every

Book Excerpt: Write Great Code—Think Low Level, Write High Level

o matter how well you write and understand high-level programming languages, your applications can probably benefit if you’re willing to dig down into the lower-level code that makes the computer work. And for most developers, that means learning assembly language and understanding compilers.In Write Great Code, Volume 2: Thinking Low-Level,

Clustering at the JVM Level to Maintain Business Logic Integrity

he way a typical three-tier architecture separates the concerns of data-management logic, business logic, and presentation logic makes clustering, the practice of deploying a single application on multiple machines, a laborious and expensive task for Java developers. (See Sidebar 1. The Typical Three-Tier Architecture.) With the separation structured the way