Kevin Hoffman

As I mentioned in my last blog post, one of the things that's missing on the Windows Phone 7 series is a local database. I was originally quite surprised at the decision not to include a SQL Express edition because the .NET Compact Framework comes with an insane amount of support for talking to local and remotely synchronized SQL databases. In lieu of having a database, the next best thing that we can do is basically write a data model using simple POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects) and decorate them with the DataContract and DataMember attributes. This will allow us to use WCF's DataContractSerializer class to read and write this object graph from a stream. The stream we're going to use is going to be one that we initialize out of Isolated Storage. The sample application I'm going to build is really simple: it's going to keep a local, isolated storage-based log of all t... (more)

iPhone Will Make Mobile AJAX and Web 2.0 Happen

Kevin Hoffman's Blog (June 11, 2007) - This morning I got to watch Steve Jobs in person do his thing, complete with reality distortion field. Despite rumors to the contrary, I felt no brainwashing tug on my mind, and felt no involuntary compulsion to buy whatever it was Steve was up there selling. I was watching a charismatic CEO do a presentation on some really cool new stuff coming out from Apple. Click here to register for AJAXWorld He started the show off with a Mac vs. PC ad where the PC guy was dressed like Steve Jobs. It was a pretty funny ad and I'm sure everyone will have... (more)

iPhone Developer Landscape After the iPhone SDK Announcement

So Steve Jobs has finally announced the availability of the iPhone SDK. It will be available sometime in February of 2008. First, before I go on, I want to counter a lot of the press and blog comments stating that the release of the SDK is a reversal or some kind of about face. If anybody had done their homework, they would know that Steve Jobs himself stated that he wanted to create an environment that supported native 3rd party app development, but that they didn't have it "right" just yet, and that he wanted people to be patient. Obviously, he didn't remember that patience is ... (more)

My Leopard Installation Experience

I've actually seen a few reports of people having trouble with the upgrade - their computer hangs at the bootup screen for hours on end. Since I didn't "upgrade" (like a good boy, I reformatted and started over) I didn't experience the hour-long hangs, however, I did experience some delays during boot. The first time I inserted the Leopard disc and it prompted me to click the button to restart, I waited for about 20 minutes at the "grey screen" waiting for the Apple logo to appear. After powering down the laptop, ejecting the CD, and starting the process over again, everything w... (more)

Taking Advantage of the Partial Class with the ADO.NET Entity Framework

So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and not just a raw translation of your database schema into objects. One thing that I have noticed is that in a lot of sample code, a lot of utility functions end up being put in inefficient locations because people forget that the entity model is a partial class. This means that you can extend the model... (more)