Welcome to DigitallyCreated! This website is where I host my blog, publish some of the software applications that I have written and display my résumé. I wrote this website entirely from the ground up rather than using an off the shelf CMS/blog software product mainly as a demonstration of my technical skills and as a learning exercise.
Blog
More Lessons from the LINQ Database Query Performance Land
July 19, 2011 2:00 PM
Writing LINQ against databases using providers like LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework is harder than it first appears. There are many different ways to write the same query in LINQ and many of them cause LINQ providers to generate really horrible SQL. LINQ to SQL is quite the offender in this area but, as we’ll see, Entity Framework can (read more)
Incremental Builds in MSBuild and How to Avoid Breaking Them
June 26, 2011 2:50 PM
One of my recent tasks at a client has been to help improve the speed of their build process. They have around 140 projects in their main Visual Studio solution, and one of the problems they had was that if they changed some code in a unit\integration test project at the bottom of the compile chain, Visual Studio would rebuild (read more)
Sweeping Yucky LINQ Queries Under the Rug with Expression Tree Rewriting
May 02, 2011 2:06 PM
In my last post, I explained some workarounds that you could hack into your LINQ queries to get them to perform well when using LINQ to SQL and SQL CE 3.5. Although those workarounds do help fix performance issues, they can make your LINQ query code very verbose and noisy. In places where you’d simply call a constructor and pass (read more)
Working Around Performance Issues in LINQ to SQL and SQL CE 3.5
April 25, 2011 5:17 PM
Recently I’ve been optimising LINQ to SQL queries running against an SQL CE 3.5 database in order to stop them taking over 5 minutes to execute and bringing them down to only a few seconds. In this post I’m going to go into two of the biggest offenders I’ve seen so far in terms of killing query performance. Credit must (read more)
Windows Phone 7 Performance Tips and Resources
April 10, 2011 9:57 AM
Following in the same vein as my previous post, this post will detail a number of tips and resources I’ve found for developing on Windows Phone 7, specifically covering optimising application performance. Unfortunately, the phone is not your eight core beast with 16GB of RAM and a graphics card that chews 300W of power when under load, so you need (read more)
Twitter Updates
LOL @readifyinternal is funny. "OH HAI, there's gonna be some downtime, here's some Youtube videos to watch instead during those 15 minutes"
@thomasjo Check this jQuery plugin out: http://t.co/BTXO2Uja. It handles all the crap of posting back asynchronously using a hidden iframe.
2 hours ago in reply to thomasjo
@thomasjo Yep, I've been screwed by this too. You need to upload a file using AJAX or something?
2 hours ago in reply to thomasjo
@thomasjo Easy mistake to make, because unlike the *.cscfg file, the *.csdef file _does_ get compiled into the package.
yesterday in reply to thomasjo
@thomasjo If write your app to get the connection string from the service config (*.cscfg), yes, they can just change that when they upload.
yesterday in reply to thomasjo
@idrajit Careful, that could end up like the Simpsons, except instead of a reactor meldown, Diablo takes over the world :)
@dwainbunker I will have the digital distro, at some point. I haven't bought it yet. Busy with The Witcher at the moment.