By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 10/10/2009 9:20 AM

I run into an (one year) old article of Udi Dahan today. He explains how REST can be used to scale up an application, of course without the need to add additional hardware.

The idea is simple. If you have a SOAP web service that thousants of clients call, then a common practice would be to add caching behind it, in order to avoid hitting your database (or other resources) for each request. Common and cheap practice that works up to some extend.

However, If you use REST instead of SOAP for your service, then your responses are simple HTTP responses. Therefor you can add some HTTP headers in them, forcing the intermediates of the communication (proxy servers for example) to cache the response themselves. The result would be that when the client tries to hit your server, intermediate servers will return the cached response instead of hitting your server. Nice!!!

Read the article...

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By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 9/20/2009 10:10 AM

I'm trying to find my way into the Silverlight world lately. And one of the most predominant phrases in this world is Model-View-ViewModel pattern or else MVVM. This good old pattern suggests the separation of concerns in the UI tier into the three distinctive layers it's name indicates. I've never dealt with MVVM before and as I said Silverlight is also new to me. Therefore I'm trying to read as much as I can before digging into the code.

The most enlightening article I've read so far is Kathleen Dollard's "Applying Model-View-View Model in Silverlight". Kathleen explains how MVVM can be helpful, how to apply it in Silverlight, but also which MVVM promises can be elusive and which not!

Another article I read during my vacations was Shawn Wildermuth's.

By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 9/14/2009 2:06 PM

I had a little problem today accessing a web resource and I decided to download Google Chrome "to get a second opinion". The last time I did the same thing was quite some time ago and since I got a new laptop recently I hadn't installed it yet. And guess what I found out? Ok, you don't have to guess... you read the title...

Yes, Google uses Microsoft .NET's ClickOnce technology to download and automatically upgrade Google Chrome in Windows Environment! If this is not a surprise what is!? Check it out...!

However... and thankfully at the end of the download there is an alternative way to get the traditional setup file, just in case something goes wrong. One would argue... what could go wrong? Well... in my case the clickonce installation did fail with the following exception: Win32Exception: The system cannot find the file specified! Now, now... don't start blaming Google or Microsoft about this!

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By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 8/14/2009 9:19 AM

I've blogged about Balsamiq Mockups in the past. Excellent tool that was really missing from my toolbox for a long time! I fully recommend it. I give Five Stars!

But the reason I'm writing this post is not about how useful and engenious it is but its about the latest blog post Peldi Guilizzoni (creator of the software) wrote. The title is "Donating Your Software: A Whole Lot of WIN!". Interesting way to look at software. Sure, being a member of WWF or Greenpeace or sending some money to Médecins Sans Frontières are noble gestures. But this is not the only way to "save this world"! Read the blog post!

By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 8/12/2009 12:14 PM

I installed Windows 7 RTM a few days ago and I decided to create my own theme pack using Athens as theme! The theme contains a number of photos from the city...

• The Parthenon
• Temple of Poseidon (Cape Sounio)
• The Athens Academy
• Panathinaikon Stadium (Kallimarmaro)
• Stoa of Attalus
• Herrodion Theatre
• The Acropolis Museum

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By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 7/31/2009 2:30 PM

Fellow MVP Shivprasad Koirala put together an excellent series of three articles with Frequently Asked Questions regarding the Windows Communication Foundation. Take a look...

WCF FAQ Part 1 : This is a 20 question FAQ for beginners which explains basic concepts of WCF like End points, contracts and bindings. It also discusses about various hosting methodologies of WCF service. The article finally ends talking about bindings and one ways operations in WCF.

WCF FAQ Part 2 : This FAQ covers 10 questions which talks about concepts like duplex contracts, hosting WCF on different protocols, MSMQ bindings, transaction isolation levels and two way communication. The article finally ends talking about two queues volatile and dead letter queue.

WCF FAQ Part 3 : 10 security related FAQ

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By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 7/22/2009 5:30 PM

I just noticed a new (?) cool feature in MSDN library today! There is a link on top of each page to switch in low bandwidth view. The result is a more simple, lighter page. This lighter page seems more clear also! Check it out.

High Bandwidth	Low Bandwidth

By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 7/12/2009 7:52 PM

To x64 or not to x64? One thing that was troubling me answering this question was the lack of 'Edit and Continue' feature when Visual Studio works under x64 (64 bit) operating system. Yes, yes. Some people will argue that this is not a big deal, since 'Edit and Continue' is just a nice to have feature and not that usefull. I will tell you something. Most of the times these people are web developers that never had the chance to use it, since it was never available when developing on ASP.NET.
Good news! Edit and Continue is available on .NET 4 even when using x64 OS! Still not possible on ASP.NET. Watch my screencast...

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By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 6/21/2009 10:41 PM

For Silverlight 2 starters I recommend this free tutorial from silverlight.net:

http://silverlight.net/learn/tutorials.aspx

There is code available both in C# and VB.

By Dimitris Papadimitriou on 3/8/2009 7:55 PM

Have you ever wondered whats behind the Times Square billboards? I was in New York City for a couple of days this week and while I was wondering around the Times Square look what I captured with my camera on the intersection of Broadway and 47th street! An application crash!

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