Confessions of a Professional Developer

In my previous few blog posts I've been talking about my experience with www.EmpireAvenue.com . In effort to record and indeed share the experience I've created this post! EAv (Empire Avenue) is part game, part social media, part marketing tool, bear with me and Ill try to explain as much as I know as simply as possible. The Game The game is based around a stock market idea but...

In my previous blog post I was looking at Dapper - basic insert and select operations versus an raw ADO.NET. In order to perform some basic speed tests (and compare lines of code written) I added a new page to my project called Benchmark.aspx with a single PlaceHolder control (called Container) to hold the results. The code and results below demonstrate that for large queries using...

I posted my first question on StackOverflow the othe dayr. A question regarding best practise for high speed raw data access (Follow the link for the full blown version). In short however it centred around whether there was a faster way to access the data than executing a stored procedure and loading a DataTable with the ExecuteReader results. At first most respondents (some...

So I happened across Empire Avenue yesterday - some two years after it went live (where have I been)?! After getting slight addicted to it yesterday and scratching the surface of some of its features I thought I'd write up some findings! The purpose is evidently to "have fun" after all its a game. People "buy" stocks in your and you in others - depending on your Social Network reach...

{EAV:d546ce401f8dfec8} This is a verification blog post for Empire Avenue - an exciting and interesting new take on Social Networking; I only joined today and Im quite smitten - Ill write a proper post all about it when I've got to grips with it a bit mor...

Whilst doing my usual round of research I have discovered that within the Developer Preview release of ASP.NET MVC 4 they have included two interesting features. Firstly Adaptive Rendering by Browser and the Mobile Application project type. The first of these allows the developer to provide different Views depending on the relevant (mobile) browser. The Mobile project type is specifically...

For a while now I've been using Visual Studio 2012 and investigating it's new features (which are many) as well as looking at the new project types and other offerings such as the new project templates and new technologies like Signal R. I decided that the best way to get a handle on all of this was to create a sample solution using as much of it all together as possible. My idea was...