Category Archives: Technical

Cmder: Making the Command Line Your Best Friend

Now that I’ve jumped fully on board the Git and GitHub bandwagon, I’m spending a lot more time at the command line.  In fact, I find myself working with both Visual Studio and the command prompt simultaneously, constantly switching back … Continue reading

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Handle Cyclical References with ASP.NET Web API 2 and MVC 6

Many ORM (object-relational mapping) tools, such as Entity Framework 6 Tools for Visual Studio 2012 & 2013, Entity Framework Power Tools, or Entity Framework Reverse POCO Generator, generate entity classes that contain cyclical references. Note: The Web API 2 solution … Continue reading

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MyGet: Continuous Integration for the Rest of Us

By this time, most .NET developers are familiar with NuGet.  It used to be that if you wanted to use some part of .NET, such as Entity Framework, you would add a reference to your project pointing to some DLL … Continue reading

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EF 6.x Code-First and Model-First with Trackable Entities 2.1

Until now Trackable Entities has required the Entity Framework Power Tools to reverse engineer Code-First model classes from an existing database.  But not long ago the Entity Framework team released the EF 6.x Tools for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, … Continue reading

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Real-World MVVM with Entity Framework and ASP.NET Web API

I just completed a sample application using Simple MVVM Toolkit together with Trackable Entities to build a real-world N-Tier solution with a WPF client and portable POCO entities that are automatically change-tracked and sent to an ASP.NET Web API service … Continue reading

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Become an N-Tier Ninja with Trackable Entities 2.0

Taking a cue from Julie Lerman and Scott Hanselman, I’ve decided to dub version 2.0 of my Trackable Entities framework, the “Ninja Edition.” After releasing v 1.0 six month ago, I received several constructive suggestions on the project discussion and … Continue reading

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Trackable Entities – Now with Repository and Unit of Work

When I released v1.0 of my Trackable Entities Framework, it came with a lot of developer goodness: NuGet packages, Visual Studio project templates, a VSIX installer available from Visual Studio’s Extensions Gallery, Getting Started guides and a screencast. From the … Continue reading

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Android and iOS Development with Simple MVVM Toolkit? Yes you can!

Note: This is Part 1 of a three part series.  This post deals with iOS development. Part 2 will delve into Android development, and Part 3 will discuss how to create a Simple Mvvm Portable Library with code that can … Continue reading

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Trackable Entities versus Self-Tracking Entities

In this blog post I’d like to perform an in-depth comparison between my own Trackable Entities framework and the now deprecated Self-Tracking Entities, written by the Entity Framework team at Microsoft. Because STE’s were discontinued with EF v4, there’s the … Continue reading

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API Improvements in Trackable Entities v1.01

I’d like to announce version 1.01 of Trackable Entities, which fixes a few issues and adds two methods to the API. DbContext.AcceptChanges: You want to call this method after performing inserts or updates in service operations (Web API or WCF), … Continue reading

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