Brian on Coding

Here are some links that I've used to find information about working with REST services. I've deviated from these as I've learned things, however these are great starting points. Introduction 2010.01.06 Starter Kit Information More information Where I went to figure out working with JSONP More information on the HTTP dlls that come with the REST Starter Kit The Web Consumer from our talk on App Harbor (warning: as this has no security I cannot guarantee that someone hasn't posted text that may be offensive to others). The Web Service from our talk on App Harbor. An eariler entry in this blog covered setting up the first service (using stored procedures). It is a good starting point, however is very incomplete and I highly recommend making the push to move towards Linq-To-SQL or entities like we discussed in the session today. I hope you all enjoyed the talk and found the session useful. Here are a couple of snippets of code to refresh. From the Service Interop: publ...

I've decided to quickly post a couple of materials that I'll be using in my talks at TCCC11. In an effort to make sure that everyone is aware of what will and won't be covered in the WCF Rest talk, I've created an outline (No slides here, just code). This will be a nice compliment to the Web API talk that was given yesterday, as it's not the same thing, but has some similar underlying technology. The outline is available for download here: Intro to WCF Rest Outline And for the design patterns talk, if you would like to review the slides, you may access them here: Intro to Design Patterns Slides If you come to the talks, I hope you find them informative and entertaining.

In this blog post, we'll walk through building a WCF Rest service in C# 4.0, from setup to deployment. Without further adieu, let's begin! To get started, it's assumed you're working in .Net 4.0 and that you have some experience with C#.net programming. Open your visual studio IDE, select Tools --> Extension Manager --> Online Gallery --> Templates --> WCF --> WCF REST Service Template 40(CS) [at the time of this posting, the template is not available in the Express Edition]. Install the template (which will give it a Green Check): After installing the template start a new project by selecting Web --> WCF REST Service Application. Create the project in a logical location on your drive and name the project PublisherService: The default project will show an object called "Sample Item" and will also give examples of ways to interact with the object using the service. This is a great thing to know and study, but for our purposes, we will b...

If you've ever worked with windows forms, one of the most annoying things that you can ever do is write some massive process and then push go, only to 'freeze' your form in place or lock it on the screen. If nothing else, it will turn completely white and you can't see anything! The solution to this problem, of course, is to run your code in a thread. This allows you to continue working with the form as the code runs asynchronously in the background. But what happens when you need your thread to alter information on the form, such as change the value of a control on the form for display to the user? You get a nice friendly error message that says: Cross-thread operation not valid: Control 'blahblahblah' accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on. To illustrate, I've built a little project I've dubbed as ThreadSmart. It's a simple windows application which contains a main form and a class. The form is just called frmMain and...

This first post is not going to contain anything other than a brief blah blah from me. This blog is going to be my landing place for posting things that I learn or things I want to share, or just plain cool things if I ever happen to find any while I'm programming. I might also post some random thoughts here about coding, or else I could post some general things so I can use this as my own reference going forward. Maybe someone else will find it useful too, who knows. Hopefully it will shape up over the next few years into a pretty cool repository. One final note is that the topics are not going to be presented in any particular order, just as I feel like writing about them. Someday maybe I'll organize it, but don't hold your breath.