At Dot Net Solutions, we are ardent advocates of the Agile philosophy. In fact we want to get t-shirts made with Eat Agile, Sleep Agile, Drink Coffee. Not that we need the caffeine, we’re connoisseurs don’t you know! The Agile umbrella is a way of working – a set of principles to advocate and emulate. There are many ways of achieving this philosophy: Lean, XP, and most people who have heard about Agile have probably heard about Scrum. Scrum is our chosen flavour for our projects, and it can be ... [Read more]

Problem statement Lately, we have been recruiting developers and architects at all levels. Our recruitment process comprises a review of a prospective employee’s CV, followed by a brief telephone interview with a few simple questions designed to eliminate the disastrous, dishonest or downright delusional applicants. The few people who make it past that stage are invited into the office for a good, in-depth, face-to-face interview where we talk tech and write code on whiteboards. This process ... [Read more]

This is the third in a series of articles describing the issues we have encountered when using Sockets in the .Net Micro Framework and highlights quite an acute problem. Symptoms You are attempting to connect to a remote endpoint over TCP. Your code looks not too dissimilar to this: public void SendData(IPAddress address, int port) { IPEndPoint endpoint = new IPEndPoint(address, port); using (var socket = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork , Socket ... [Read more]

In a previous blog post I described the Linger error that we were running into from time to time and how you can mitigate against this by setting the ‘Linger’ option on the socket. This was the first of several issues we identified when working with Sockets in the .Net Micro Framework 3.0. The next challenge we faced was to do with intermittent performance problems when communicating over HTTPS. Example: The Socket Client Demo We had noticed that the time it took for our application to com ... [Read more]

One of the more significant challenges that we have faced during our last project presented itself to us about halfway through the project timeline. Our .Net Micro Framework application regularly sends messages to remote endpoints out on the internet over HTTPS/TCP. In isolation a single HTTPS request using the .Net Micro Framework was a pain free operation (even if there is no HTTPS stack out of the box). However, the problem was that after an indeterminate period of time our application wou ... [Read more]

This article was written from my experiences of working with version 3 of the .Net Micro Framework. Version 4 is now out and promises much – to the best of my knowledge this article is still relevant, but is as yet untested. The Problem: So you’ve been working on the .Net Micro Framework for a while. Recently you’ve added a couple of new classes to your project, implemented some new functionality and now it doesn’t compile. Your code has no syntax errors yet when you attempt to compile you ... [Read more]

The .NET Micro Framework enables devices to be developed using the same managed C# language and Visual Studio tools we use for all our other projects. More details about the .NET Micro Framework can be found on the Microsoft site. At Dot Net Solutions, we have a strong belief in Agile development and XP programming. So when we started to develop for the .NET Micro Framework, we immediately looked for its support for unit testing. However, we discovered that there was no support available. No ... [Read more]

Here at Dot Net Solutions, we have been working on a project using the .NET Micro Framework for the past year. The .NET Micro Framework enables devices to be developed using the same managed C# language and Visual Studio tools we use for all our other projects. More details about the .NET Micro Framework can be found on the Microsoft site. Much of the development and initial testing was done against the Tahoe II board from Device Solutions. However, the target hardware was somewhat different ... [Read more]

About once a week Johan sends out a company tweet about cool stuff that people were working with on Friday afternoon. I was on the way back from holiday but I did see something interesting. Several months back I switched from a rival navigation system to a TomTom navigation system, and on Friday afternoon the TomTom asked me to make a U-Turn and showed exactly where to make the turn. With the previous system that would mean I’d missed a turning, but the TomTom is looking ahead for me. As I ... [Read more]

It has been a while now that Windows Azure got released and I have been exploring it for quite sometime too. Recently I had this burning desire to try Azure Blob storage and was going through some thoughts and then I decided- Would it not be great if I can compose a Deep Zoom image and deploy it in Azure Blob storage and access it from my Silverlight application. Since I went through a bit of digging myself in doing this, I thought I would just show this in a few short and simple steps for ... [Read more]