Learning as a systematic long process

This post came after two months of silence, I was confused whether to post it in my other blog about agnosticism and atheism or here in my personal blog, the source of this confusion came from the fact that it's about both: the rational thinking and technology at the same time.

Codility review

How to find good programmers, it's not an easy task these days, some people consider programming to be the practice of dragging and dropping some controls on a form, writing some events, connecting to databases and voila you've gotten a working product.

This kind of programmers are the joy killers, what's really interesting about programming is problem solving techniques, something similar to ACM contests, it's about the way we think and make decisions under time critical conditions.

OEC Visual studio add-in and nuget support

When it comes to extending the entity classes and adding some features not supported (yet) by RIA services, I had to add a lot of boilerplate code, this is because it’s impossible to change the behaviour of the base class (Entity), so the only way was to add interfaces to support the required behaviour. Hence, in ObservableCollection library you’ll find ICollectionChanged interface, which should be implemented by any Entity that would expose some ObservableEntityCollection(s).

DevExpress DXWindow Control and XAML Designer

If you are using DevExpress controls, you probably encountered a very annoying issue related to one of the Silverlight controls, it’s the DXWindow control. the problem is when you add new DXWindow to Silverlight project , then all you see is a small squared border control, you can’t interact with the control directly through XAML designer, this is the moment when Microsoft Expression Blend becomes Microsoft Blind, who turned off the designer.

WCF RIA Serializing EntityCollection, a workaround

WCF RIA Service is still an immature framework, it's given to you as easy-to-implement solution for RIA applications, but at the cost of following their paradigm. When I want to implement what I consider one of the most crucial features in modern application like: partial updates, this framework itself becomes an obstacle.

ObservableEntityCollection–Wrapping the EntityCollection

 

In my applications, most of time I have a parent Entity and child items where I need to provide the user with visual  hint when something changed in the Entity by changing the background color, this gives the application the professional behaviour expected by any user. this should be done through binding and MVVM. These changes include the following: changing one attribute on the parent, changing an attribute on one of the child items, deleting or removing child items. All these operations should mark the entity as dirty. 

Usually we create EF model in the solution, and WCF RIA service to use this model, we except everything to work fine after just connecting the Silverlight application with the web application, and for simple scenarios it does, but when you want to add some nice-to-have features you will come across limitations.

TS: Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4

I passed the 70-516 and I'm one step away from being MCPD, not all news are good, the bad news is that these certificates are scheduled for retirement in the 31 July, 2013. But they are valid for .NET 4.0 as long as the companies are looking for specialists in this field.