Softwhack

My head hurts just thinking about MVVM... There's quite a lot of rhetoric out there about what MVVM is and how to best implement it.  And the hard part is that a lot of it is correct, even though seemingly at odds at times.  To add to the confusion, I put forth my own opinion that, as with all true engineering efforts, you need to use your brain and do what works best for you, your team, and your products. This the heart of MVVM to me - MVVM is simply a pattern that can be used to make your software of a higher quality and more reusable and resilient to layer/requirement changes.  Use it as best suits your needs.  Forget about what you may hear or read about the 'rules' or 'laws' or MVVM - there are none.  It's a pattern.  Nothing more.  Some people say that you should have no code-behind, ever.  Some say you can.  The correct information is that there are no rules about code-behind or anything else, because it is...just...a...pattern, n...

As much fun as it has been to code almost exlusively in ASP.NET with jQuery, I'm moving on to Silverlight 4.  I've actually be working almost exclusively in Silverlight for the past 2 - 3 months, and I love it!  We are using the MVVM design pattern with Prism.  MVVM and Prism (or another IOC) with Silverlight/WPF are an absolute must for complex business apps.  I don't think I have ever absorbed new technology like I have with Silverlight.  Delicious. Anyways, my next several posts will be focusing on Silverlight, with many MVVM-focused posts, and some other stuff as they come (learning and mastering SQL is a lifelong process apparently...) like: Stackpanel with Image size gotcha Mouse event commanding in Silverlight Creating custom attached properties and binding them to your viewmodel Popup and childwindows in Silverlight w/ MVVM - my own take on this subject A good case for temp tables over table variables in MSSQL Lots of fun stuff here, and more t...

In designing my first scalable, flashy, performant (yes, I'll use this word I guess) internet app, I spent quite a bit of time in the database exploration realm, which really comes down to one question on a no-budget venture like I'm beginning with: open source or free? Deciding on a database for a web app is like deciding on the materials for the building you're designing - mui importante. When I took a database class in graduate school (nope, didn't know much about them until then), we exclusively used MySQL with a C API, while developing (supposedly) on a Linux platform। We weren't even allowed to use C++ and I still think my professor believes that C is better than C++ in every way...but I digress। Knowing of the ridiculous (yes, ridiculous because I have used them extensively) debuggers available on Linux (clunky, buggy, slow, incompatible with various g++ compilation types, etc.), I decided to develop my programs on Windows using VS2003 (with a free academic...