Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5

I have made some significant improvements and bug fixes on the latest 2.5.4 release of Dropthings, my open source Web 2.0-style AJAX Portal built on ASP.NET 3.5, Linq to SQL, Linq to Xml, Silverlight, Enterprise Library, Unity, Velocity, and what not. All the cool production quality techs you want to see in action are there in Dropthings – in a production quality open source project that powers critical portals around the world.

There’s no with keyword in C#, like Visual Basic. So you end up writing code like this:

ParallelWork is an open source free helper class that lets you run multiple work in parallel threads, get success, failure and progress update on the WPF UI thread, wait for work to complete, abort all work (in case of shutdown), queue work to run after certain time, chain parallel work one after another. It’s more convenient than using .NET’s BackgroundWorker because you don’t have to declare one component per work, nor do you need to declare event handlers to receive notification and carry additional data through private variables. You can safely pass objects produced from different thread to the success callback. Moreover, you can wait for work to complete before you do certain operation and you can abort all parallel work while they are in-flight. If you are building highly responsive WPF UI where you have to carry out multiple job in parallel yet want full control over those parallel jobs completion and cancellation, then the ParallelWork library is the right solution for you.

PlantUmlEditor is my new free open source UML designer project built using WPF and .NET 3.5. If you have used plantuml before, you know that you can quickly create sophisitcated UML diagrams without struggling with a designer. Especially those who use Visio to draw UML diagrams (God forbid!), you will be at heaven. This is a super fast way to get your diagrams up and ready for show. You can *write* UML diagrams in plain English, following a simple syntax and get diagrams generated on-the-fly.

You usually write unit test and integration test code separately using different technologies. For example, for unit test, you use some mocking framework like Moq to do the mocking. For integration test, you do not use any mocking, just some test classes that hits some service or facade to do end-to-end integration test. However, sometimes you see that the integration and unit test are more or less same, they test the same class using its interface and perform the same tests against the same expectation. For example, if you think about a WCF service, you write unit test to test the ServiceContract using the interface where you use some mocking framework to mock the interface of the WCF Service. If you look at the following example, I am using Moq to test IPortalService interface which is a ServiceContract for a WCF service. I am using xUnit and SubSpec to do BDD style tests.

If your computer is running hot or battery running out quickly then it is most likely due to some application or process consuming high CPU or memory. If you keep running applications for a long time, for example, Outlook, then it continues to grow in memory consumption and does not free up memory efficiently. As a result, your computer runs out of physical memory and other applications run slower. Sometimes Outlook, browser, image editing applications or some other application start taking full CPU as they get into some heavy internal processing and make your CPU hot and other applications perform slower.

I have enhanced my streaming Ajax Proxy with POST, PUT and DELETE features. Previously it supported only GET. Now it supports all 4 popular methods for complete REST support. Using this proxy, you can call REST API on external domain directly from your website’s javascript code. You can test the proxy from this link:

I am a 64bit freak. I got Windows 7, Outlook 2010, Conferencing Addin all 64 bit versions to work on a Macbook pro. Those who are thinking about moving to 64bit and hesitating whether something will break, GO AHEAD! Macbook Pro hardware and Microsoft’s software are the best combination out there. You will enjoy every moment you spend with your laptop. Moreover, I have tried these combinations on HP tablet PC, Sony VAIO, Dell Inspiron and Dell Vostro. HP works best. Others are struggling with driver issues.