How To


Separating the UI Code from the Business Code: What's Reasonable?

Peter Vogel moves a Windows Form to a modern design pattern, which forces him to think about how his code should be divided up among his classes. In the end, he comes up with some rules for making those decisions.

Using Knockout Custom Binding Handlers

Knockout custom binding handlers can help simplify integration with third-party JavaScript libraries. Here's how.

Calling Stored Procedures from Entity Framework

Even in a Code First environment, you can call a stored procedure from a DbContext object. But it's a lot easier if you use the visual designer.

Using OAuth, Twitter and Async To Display Data

Connect to Twitter from a mobile application using OAuth with the Xamarin.Auth library, along with Joe Mayo's LINQ To Twitter library.

Neural Network Cross Entropy Error

To train a neural network you need some measure of error between computed outputs and the desired target outputs of the training data. The most common measure of error is called mean squared error. However, there are some research results that suggest using a different measure, called cross entropy error, is sometimes preferable to using mean squared error.

Making Complex Types Useful with Entity Framework 6 Custom Configurations

Complex Types let you reuse structures in your database design. But unless you've been very lucky around the names in your database, you probably couldn't use Complex Types -- until Entity Framework 6, that is.

Structuring and Loading TypeScript Modules

TypeScript provides native support both for organizing your application's client-side code into a set of modules, and for freeing you from having to manage the resulting script tags.

SQLite Queries and Primary Keys

Learn about SQLite database engine internals so you can simplify your code and improve the performance of your applications.

Async Processing in EF6 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5

The latest version of Entity Framework makes it easier to write asynchronous code. Here's how to write that code, and more important, where you'll actually find it useful.

What's New in Entity Framework 6 (Plus How To Upgrade!)

The latest version of the technology works fine with the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Here's some of what's new (along with how to move your applications to EF6).

Using Visual States in Your Windows Phone User Controls

Nick Randolph demonstrates two techniques for using Visual States to change the layout of a Windows Phone User Control.

Neural Network How-To: Code an Evolutionary Optimization Solution

Evolutionary optimization can be used to train a neural network. A virtual chromosome holds the neural network's weights and bias values, and the error term is the average of all errors between the network's computed outputs and the training data target outputs. Learn how to code the solution.

Asynchronous MSMQ Processing

Peter wraps up his look at offloading processing from the mainline of your application in order to improve response time by looking at processing message queues asynchronously.

Developing the Developer Community

Community involvement is an often overlooked -- but increasingly important -- part of what it means to be a developer.

SQLite Performance and Prepared Statements

SQLite is a tremendously useful database for C++ developers. In this follow-up, Kenny Kerr shows various techniques for improving performance even further.

Creating a Client-Side Master-Detail Page in an AJAX App with TypeScript

Using Breeze and Knockout, you just need a few lines of TypeScript code to create a master/detail page that retrieves records from the server when it has to, but skips the trip to the server when it isn't necessary.

ASP.NET MVC Extensibility with MEF

How to use MEF to add validation rule components to an ASP.NET MVC Web application.

A Constant Issue

Defining constants in your application is a good thing. But if you understand constants you can also decide when you don't need to use them, how to name them, when to set up exceptions to your names and -- the best thing -- when to replace them with parameters.

7 More Top Tips for Visual Studio 2013

Part 1 presented six top tips for Visual Studio 2013. Part 2 wraps up the series with seven more tips that every developer needs to know about the latest version of the Visual Studio IDE.

Regular Expressions, Part 3: Business Intelligence Uses

You can do a lot more with regular expressions than you think. In this tutorial, you'll use it to convert a movie list into a CSV file for use in Excel.

Implementing CRUD Activities in a TypeScript ViewModel

Peter adds client-side update, delete and insert support to an ASP.NET application using TypeScript. Along the way he shows how TypeScript interface support allows you to integrate your objects with JavaScript libraries in TypeScript 0.9.5.

Picking Up Queue Messages: Strategy and Tactics

If you're using MSMQ to offload work from your Web site, you have a number of ways to pick up those messages, including processing those messages as soon as they turn up.

Rapid Windows Phone Application Development Using MvvmCross

Nick Randolph takes MvvmCross for a spin and shows how quickly you can build an application for Windows Phone and other mobile platforms.

Using Portable Class Libraries in iOS and Android Apps

Portable Class Libraries create a single DLL that can be used across platforms, making code sharing easier. Learn how to use them by building a weather app with a portable core.

Learning to Use Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Optimization

Evolutionary optimization (EO) is a type of genetic algorithm that can help minimize the error between computed output values and training data target output values. Use this demo program to learn to the method.

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