My friend Panos wrote today about Nikhil Kothari's Facebook.Net framework (hosted at Codeplex) as well as Steve Trefethen's starter kit as various tools you could use to develop Facebook applications using .Net. I'd like to add to those The Facebook developer toolkit that evolved from the Microsoft - Facebook partnership. Although this download comes from the Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions product line (as you may notice) nothing stops you from using it with Visual Studio. Furthermore (if you're willing to play with cutting edge technology ;-) you could give Popfly's Facebook blocks (which are products of the same...

As always this time of year I begun thinking on all the things I want to read, listen, view and code during my summer vacation free time, even though I never get the chance to do all the things I plan to ;-). So I've already bought my PSP extra memory (2GB) and plan to fill it with podcasts, webcasts and videos so I can watch on my free time. Technologies and products that I'm especially interested this summer include : Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, Jasper, Linq, .Net 3.5, C# 3.0 etc. I've already begun searching for those but...

After investigating the missing Live Writers's spell checking problem for a while, I discovered that the problem was caused by my computer's regional settings (Greek). As it turns out, spell checking is only enabled when Live Writer is started using the en-US regional settings. The unfortunate assumption by the Live Writer's team was that since spell checking works only for English, it should be disabled for any other regional settings :-s ... If that assumption was correct, then other programs like Office for example shouldn't have spell checking either, for non English regional settings PCs. Anyway, searching the web I found a...

Having been to Mix06 I knew that there were going to be a lot of cool things coming out this year too. So I've been following closely Mix07, although I didn't manage to go this year and I must say that I'm pretty excited with all the things announced (although some were expected ;-) ). One of the coolest demos I've seen so far is the Silverlight Airlines application posted by David Anson. I just hope that it will work for Europe as well as USA soon. Check it out.

In case you’ve didn’t notice Marin has posted a comment regarding my WPFSubsonic project and to be more precise a way I can read my application configuration file through my custom Visual Studio Tool. Now I just need to port it to my solution that supports the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and ObservableCollection class so that SubSonic Object can be bound to WPF controls. Thanks Martin

Some of you have been asking on my WPFSubsonic project status. Well I have to admit that things have been pretty hectic lately so I haven’t been able to complete it. I still haven’t found a way to pass configuration data on the custom tool but I have thought about it and I’m probably going to use XAML serializer/de-serializer in order to pass a configuration file to the custom tool. For those of you that you simply can’t wait J, I’m posting a first built. In this build the DAL generation happens through...

I don’t know how many of you are interested or follow up on this effort. For those of you that do, I’m happy to say that the first release is very close. The issue I still have to solve before publishing my code is the configuration one. Subsonic uses Web.Config to specify Database connection strings and the .Net 2.0 provider model to specify the Database drivers to be used. All these are configured in a custom configuration section that is read with a WebConfigurationSection descendant class at built time. Since though custom build providers are not available at the Windows Forms platform...

I don’t know how long it’s been since I wrote my last Data Access Layer or piece of SQL Code, it certainly has been too long to even remember. Since then I’ve used a number of ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) or/and DAL Code Generators to perform all the tedious data access manipulation  I needed. The ones I’ve used are LLBGen : Unfortunately this free version stop evolving a long time ago (since .Net framework 1.1) and became a commercial solution,Olero’s  ORM.Net : Which was my favorite Open Source (GPL Licensed) ORM, although it...