Saturday, July 21, 2007

Tutorials on LINQ

Excellent blog with tutorials on LINQ from Scott Guthrie.

Scott Guthrie on Linq

Friday, July 20, 2007

LINQ and useful Blog

Last few days finally had a chance to do some research, after the last few months of heavy development and deployment for new multinational customers.

I focused on LINQ the Microsoft technology as a potential answer to something which grows tiresome for me when architecting on demand applications. I don't know about you all out there, but I am getting tired of building Data Access Layers and trying multiple different ways of defining SQL statements in this layer and reviewing all sorts of frameworks which are supposed to help in this area.

After playing around with LINQ in Visual Studio.NET codename "Orcas", I can say I am extremely excited. LINQ is basically Microsoft's response to this problem. It provides a way of managing in code, relational databases as objects. Thus merging the normally disparate application code and SQL queries against the database.

Also found an excellent Blog from Wriju at Microsoft. Check it out. I found it very useful.

Wriju on LINQ

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Microsoft Startup Zone

Check out this link. Microsoft article on Forcelogix. This Microsoft site provides excellent case studies on SAAS Startups and on what they are doing in Partnership with Microsoft. There are some excellent Blogs there also with info on startup challenges, funding etc.
Forcelogix Article in Microsoft Startup Zone

Monday, July 16, 2007

New Stuff

Note to self: find something original to write about Silverlight, WPF, Linq and Acropolis.
This is really cool stuff to be playing round with, and there are plenty of bloggers writing about them now. Just need to find a different angle to discuss.

Internationalization and Localization

Just spent the last 2 months, building and rolling out localized versions of our web and windows products to multiple countries including Japan, The Netherlands, UK and Ireland, Belgium and Greece.

This was a true challenge in the scheme of things as localization and translation is traditionally done at build time of applications, but in the On Demand world this is not practical as every client has different needs and we are using a single instance of the application (hence the term multi-Tenant).

Our challenge was two fold, building a localization architecture which was dynamic for both the web piece and then being able to synchronize localization information to offline clients.

What we did was move application string resources to a SQL Server datastore and still use the .NET Framework Resource Manager. This enabled us to provide an Admin module to our clients in our On Demand Web Application which allowed our clients to perform translations dynamically. The benefits for doing it this was immense, the client could see the results of their changes immediately in the front end application on the web, and the translations would synchronize down to offline users on their next synchronization.

The project is a major success and we have users all around the globe using our application localized to their culture.