JavaScript Garbage Collector Presentation

I was lucky enough to be able to give my first technical presentation at the Carolina Code Camp, and it was definitely a great experience. When thinking of a topic for this event, I felt it would be best to learn something new and to learn something that I actually wanted to learn and not something…

10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn AngularJS

There is no doubt that AngularJS – the self-proclaimed “superheroic JavaScript framework” – is gaining traction. I’ll refer to it frequently as just “Angular” in this post. I’ve had the privilege on working on an enterprise web application with a large team (almost 10 developers, soon growing to over 20) using Angular for over half…

Video: A JavaScript Feed Reader in Under 10 Minutes Using Angular JS

An important component of the decision to use a framework should be the amount of ceremony and ritual involved. You must carefully weigh what it takes to ramp up on the technology and how common tasks are performed. It does no good to adopt a library that forces you to solve a problem with more…

JavaScript Chaos with Canvas

I learned about chaos theory quite by accident. On a family vacation we stopped by a campground along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains. I was not an outdoor enthusiast at the time so while my parents were hiking I preferred to head over to the arcade to play Donkey Kong and Tempest.…

Five Reasons ASP.NET Developers Shouldn’t Worry About Node

I devoted my last post to reasons why ASP.NET developers should pay attention to Node.js. Taking a queue from high school debate team, and because no technology decision (or opinion) exists in a vacuum, I’d like to turn the tables and consider a few reasons why ASP.NET developers might stay away from Node (or at…

A Behavior Change in Visual Studio 2013 .NET Breakpoints

One of my favorite tricks is to use Visual Studio breakpoints to call a method to force state changes when testing code. There’s just some times where calling a method at a breakpoint is the fastest way to create a test. To call a method at a breakpoint, set a regular location breakpoint, right click…

Five Reasons ASP.NET Developers Should Care About Node.js

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or perhaps in a van down by the river) you may have noticed that Node.js is kind of a big deal. Since its introduction in late 2009, Node has steadily grown in popularity and now occupies prime real estate as a (if not the) de facto choice of…

Cookbook for ASP.NET MVC and Angular.js Web Apps

As I’ve spent time with AngularJS, I’ve become very impressed with the clarity it brings to developing enterprise-level web applications. I thought it would also be valuable to create a GitHub repository with some examples of how one might integrate AngularJS with ASP.NET MVC. Thus, the Angular-MVC-Cookbook repository was born. I hope that I (and…

Displaying Multiple .NET Objects with WinDBG’s Command Language

While we are getting some nice tools from Microsoft for analyzing our memory, there’s still a lot of gaps where you have to resort to WinDBG and SOS. A perfect example that I’ve run into is looking at variables/types that are in different app domains because the Visual Studio debugging environment has essentially zero support…

How Many Secrets do .NET PDB Files Really Contain?

Now that Devscovery is over, it’s time to get back to answering questions about one of my favorite subjects: PDB files! Yes, I lead an extremely exciting life if PDB files set my heart racing. Maybe they have a pill for that. In my blog post on PDBs and remote debugging Patrick asked an interesting…

Correctly Creating Native C++ Release Build PDBs

In my ongoing discussion of PDB files and debugging, Sa Li had a great question: Should the final release native program also generate the pdb files before being published? If switching on the pdb in link setting, what kind of info would be added into the .exe executable file? I found our program grows a…

Do PDB Files Affect Performance?

After a detour into Historical Debugging, it’s time to come back to return to answering questions about PDB files. Here’s a question from Justin: Thanks for the great post once again. I was looking forward to your debugging virtual training, but unfortunately it was cancelled. The company I work for is pushing pack against building…