23 October 2012

Entity Framework 5 performance improvements for testable applications

    Earlier this year I wrote a series of posts about how to automate Entity Framework(EF) testing but since then a lot of things happened: EF 5 was released, it was made open source and Microsoft has published an in-depth article about performance tweaks for older versions of EF and performance improvements in EF 5. Following these events I can now expand my previous post and address an important performance consideration around the EF testable interface that I described earlier.

18 October 2012

Post-Silverlight remarks

    After spending a year and a half in XAML land using Silverlight extensively I leave with pleasant memories but also with a bitter feeling.

    The main strength of Silverlight is creating complex applications for Windows/Mac OS X with ease while maintaining a low deployment footprint. Silverlight XAML is almost identical with WPF XAML minus a couple of features and this versatility seems to make Silverlight an essential tool for the enterprise application developer. But since Microsoft abruptly shifted focus from Silverlight to HTML5 in 2011 the Silverlight open source ecosystem has imploded rapidly.