To maximize performance, all applications must properly manage the flow of data. When dealing with an entity (one row of data), Visual Studio LightSwitch transfers the entire entity from the data layer to the client, the user interface (UI) layer. When dealing with collections (rows of data) LightSwitch uses Visual Collections, and is very deliberate as to how, and when it places entities in the Visual Collection.

I want a way to keep track of questions that people have about LightSwitch.  And I want it to primarily use it on my mobile devices.

I found this one walkthrough particularly clear about what makes a great game. I wrote down some notes just to see who could call these things out if I asked them. I am not sure I could have but these are some great discussion points that a team could use when they sit down to write a game.

Predicate methods allow you to separate the criteria you're using to test items in a collection from the code that processes the collection. You may never write a For...Each loop again.

Suppose you have this class in assembly Alpha.DLL

Enter a url to see how the css rules interact with that page

Ever wondered how those key files in ~/.ssh actually work? How secure are they actually?

I am one of the original organizers of both RubyConf and RailsConf. Combined, I’ve organized or been on the program committee for around 25 conferences. I’ve read hundreds of proposals and seen hundreds of conference talks.

Since taking on my current sales/business development role, one of the skills I’ve gained is the ability to find almost anyone’s email address. It’s an odd skill, but I’ve found it to be useful time and time again. There’s a system to how I do it, and in the following post, I’ll share the system.

Buttery smooth scroll views are the pride of many iOS developers and the figurehead of great iOS apps. I wasn't developing for the iOS platform in the early days, but from todays perspective it seems to me that Tweetie by Loren Brichter was one of the first very successful apps which really cultivated the art of squeezing out every bit of graphics performance the devices had to offer. Loren was very open about his technique to just draw the contents of each cell with Core Graphics as a single bitmap, so that the GPU was able to do what it could do best – pushing around opaque textures.

There are many iOS prototyping tools out there: Briefs 2, POP, Prototypr just to name a few. The one that really struck me as the most efficient is Flinto by far. Ironically, it’s the only Web-based tool amongst them. And there is nothing better out there. It will literally take minutes to create a prototype that looks like it was made using Xcode Storyboard.

In various AngularJS tutorials and documentation, the authors choose to use service or factory but don't explain why you would use one or the other. Few mention that value and constant are also options.

For most of my professional programming career I have worked with the .NET framework. However, a recent side project prompted me to learn the open source Ruby on Rails framework. As you might imagine, there are some major differences between Ruby and .NET, but there are some compelling reasons to learn Ruby on Rails. Through my journey, I found some great resources for learning Ruby on Rails, and whether you are a seasoned developer or simply taking the first step into learning the framework, here are some of the ones that I found extremely helpful.

Paradoxically, it’s possible to make better decisions by not deciding. I’m a world class procrastinator, so what’s to stop me from reading this as carte blanche? Why do today what I can put off until tomorrow?

It was on a HN comment thread where I first heard about Rubber Duck Debugging (hat tip @danielbmarkham).

I’ve been blogging for almost eleven years, and I’ve been writing at this domain for almost nine. In that time, I’ve used several different blogging platforms (blosxom, b2, one I made myself called Thistle, WordPress, and now Octopress), and I’ve redesigned my blog about once every couple of years.

Meteor is a framework for building real-time client-server applications in JavaScript. It is build from the ground up to work with MongoDB – a JSON database which gives you storage that’s idiomatic for JavaScript.

Raspberry Pi is a nice tiny computer with a relatively powerful VideoCore graphics processor, and an ARM core bolted on the side running Linux. Around October 2012 I was bringing Wayland to it, and in November the Weston rpi-backend was merged upstream. Unfortunately, somehow I did not get around to write about it. In spring 2013 I did a follow-on project on the rpi-backend for the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of my work for Collabora. We are now really pushing Wayland forward on the Raspberry Pi, and strengthening Collabora's Wayland expertise on all fronts. In the following I will explain what I did and how the new rpi-backend for Weston works in technical terms. If you are more interested in why this was done, I refer you to the excellent post by Daniel Stone: Weston on Raspberry Pi.

You’ve probably seen this trick used before with social icons or a sidebar that sticks to the top of your screen as you scroll down the page. The problem is that often they don’t stop scrolling and up either disappearing behind another element or overlapping something they shouldn’t, which looks cheap and unprofessional. In this tutorial we’ll create a ‘sticky element’ that only scrolls until the maximum height of it’s parent element which will prevent that unsightly overflow.

Punit Ganshani illustrates how to use claims identity with SimpleMembershipProvider in ASP.NET MVC 4

I'm posting this mainly to remind myself how to do this as I keep on forgetting (anyone with good *nix-foo won't learn anything here).

I had a brief chat with Andrew Gelman about the topic of generative vs. discriminative models. It came up when I was asking him why he didn’t like the frequentist semicolon notation for variables that are not random. He said that in Bayesian analyses, all the variables are considered random. It just turns out we can sidestep having to model the predictors (i.e., covariates or features) in a regression. Andrew explains how this works in section 14.1, subsection “Formal Bayesian justification of conditional modeling” in Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd Edition (the 3rd Edition is now complete and will be out in the foreseeable future). I’ll repeat the argument here.

The "Cat and Animal" example is a perfect one to illustrate what is so fundamentally broken about trying to model software systems as an ontology where the definition of each "object" is encoded in its "class."

We are proud to announce the release of a very large dataset of counted dependency tree fragments from the English Books Corpus. This resource will help researchers, among other things, to model the meaning of English words over time and create better natural-language analysis tools. The resource is based on information derived from a syntactic analysis of the text of millions of English books.

John Penix describes the test automation system and the supporting build system infrastructure used by Google.