Creating Help documents for web and desktop applications.

During software application development there is always a moment when user manual an help content must be written. Choosing appropriate tool for that is very important and decides about help creating and updating process speed. Help format is as important as the help itself and must be easily accessible from the application and convenient for the end user.

Abstract repository for direct EF, WCF and WCF Data Services connection with database.

In this article I would like to show you my implementation and approach for using abstract repository no matter if the client is connecting directly to the database using Entity Framework, over WCF service or WCF Data Services (WCFDS) service.

Blogging – things to keep in mind

Here are some things that are worth remembering before posting:

DI Containers – comparison

This blog shortly describes a few chosen DI containers and their out-of-the-box functionality. If a certain container does not have a specific platform listed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not possible to use it there – it just means that it’s not in the box.

Authentication, Authorization and other things we shouldn’t worry about any more

Recently I needed to do some research on the topic of authentication, authorization and related stuff. After spending quite some time on it, I was pretty depressed – one would imagine, that a topic so common has already been handled in a standardized, common and comfortable (both for the user and the developer) way – well, it hasn’t, or do I demand to much?

Dependency Injection Containers

In a previous post, I tried to describe what inversion of control is. Here, we’ll take a look at the design pattern that helps with it.

A quick intro to IoC

There are two terms that have been loudly spoken for a while now IoC (Inversion of Control) and DI (Dependency Injection). In this post, I’ll try to sketch a picture of what these terms actually mean.

Elmah

Elmah stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers. It’s a very interesting little library. There’s a pretty neat (although old) article on it by Scott Hanselman and a follow up.

Document databases

I’ve recently heard a couple of times about mongodb and finally had a moment to look further into it.

The concept is pretty familiar – to have a data store that is not a relational database. I’ve stumbled upon the info about xml or file system databases (the latter one is used e.g by svn), though nothing seemed to stick.

XML Transformations

A while ago Microsoft released a very handy feature that allows for transforming web.config files during builds. This is a great thing, except for some reason, they limited the functionality to web.config files, which was strange, because the engine itself was designed to work against any xml file. Thankfully, that limitation is pretty much gone with a plugin called SlowCheetah.