Brian Ball

NuGet.org, the go-to, repository for .NET developers to find and download packages, has just announced the launch of the site redesign they have been working on. There’s a link from the original site to use the preview site, or you can go directly to it by navigating to preview.nuget.org. According to the release announcement, the […]

The Day 1 Keynote for Microsoft Build 2017 was a great mix of developer inspirations and new technology releases. The inspiration piece ranged from large fortune 500 companies leveraging Azure all the way to a researcher building a watch-like device that helped a woman with Parkinsons write her own name for the first time in […]

Visual Studio 2017 is now RTM and is available for download. This new version of Visual Studio brings many new features: New Installation Experience – Select only the components you need to use (e.g. web, windows, mobile development features) Supports C# 7.0 language features Debugging Improvements – Exception Helper, faster code navigation, run to click, […]

Since the announcement of the Microsoft/Adobe partnership at Ignite, we at Perficient have been working to make this a first-class offer for our clients. The internet wouldn’t exist if all the world’s computers were isolated from one another. Networking is the foundation of modern day computing, so it’s only logical to start with this topic! […]

Executing unit tests as part of a Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) build process has, until now, been the most pain free process I’ve ever encountered. In fact, if you select the Visual Studio build template, there is already a step that handles executing and publishing results of your unit tests. It assumes the convention […]

MSDeploy (a.k.a. Web Deploy) is mainly known as a technology to deploy web applications, but it is much more than that. It is a platform that can be used to deploy many different application and application components. It accomplishes this by allowing custom providers to be written. MSDeploy ships with providers that cover a wide-range […]

C# 5.0 introduced two new keywords: async and await. These keywords have a very powerful effect that can be used without fully understanding them. This is a double-edged sword. It’s great to have a language feature that doesn’t take much time to implement, but at the same time, if there isn’t at least a basic understanding, […]

User-Defined Functions (UDFs) are great, and have been part of SQL Server for a long time now. They come in two primary flavors: scalar and table-value. The first returns a single value, where as the second will return an entire result set. It’s not uncommon to want to reuse a block of SQL. Views are […]

When SQL Server 2008 was released, two of the features added were Change Data Capture and Change Tracking. Both features are essentially designed to allow users to query a database and determine what data has changed. However, they go about it in two very different ways. Some of the differences are obvious while others are […]

Type inference is a language feature that isn’t very well-known, yet it is used by virtually every developer. It was formalized in the C# language with C# 3.0. Let’s start with an example of some code: List<string> myList = new List<string>(); myList.Add<string>(“hello”); The code isn’t too bad, but can be cleaned up: var myList = […]

I came across something interesting in SharePoint the other day. I knew that a user can open a SharePoint task list in MS Project, edit the items, then hit save, and the changes will be reflected in the task list. This can be done by going to the task list screen, clicking on the “List” […]

    I was given a task recently to have an application generate and send an email. The requirements were straight forward, the email should contain some customer information along with a list of products. My first thought was to use StringBuilder to handle the task, but something about that bothered me. In 2013, am I still […]