Business Case Studies

http://guides.lib.uchicago.edu/case_studies

Awesome cartoons

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg

Save Money with Amazon Coupons

Wouldn't it be great to get fashion items, kitchen equipment or even gardening tools at reduced prices any time you wanted, instead of having to wait for those closeout or clearance sales? Well you can now with a little insight, and more importantly innovations brought to you by www.azPriceWatch.com who have constantly seek out and publish a variety of amazon coupons in various different categories, to save you money.

Coupons from azPriceWatch.com range from food item coupons, such as the range of Taco Bell food products (Use TACOBEL5) to that of 15 to 30% off of diamond and emerald nuts, the choices are extensive! Visit http://www.azpricewatch.com/Amazon/Coupons for their extensive range of Amazon Coupons.

Simple online RegEx Testing tool

http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/09/a-better-dotnet-regular-expression-tester.ashx

Creating Custom State Activities in WF 3.5

Hi there.
Recently ran into the task to create custom state activities for Microsoft Workflow Foundation and it appears to be not simple as expected.
Here are couple links that can drive you in the right direction:

First one: Why are there no 'composite state activities'?

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/windowsworkflowfoundation/thread/e0af5e93-15df-473e-8573-fb0846a38cb6/

http://doogalbellend.blogspot.com/2007/11/developing-custom-state-activities.html

Storing variables in XOML Workflows
http://doogalbellend.blogspot.com/2008/02/storing-variables-in-xoml-workflow.html

Is Singleton in .Net always single?

Just ran into unusual scenario - couple appdomains, dynamic assembly loading and a singleton class defined in one of the assemblies.
You would expect singleton to have only one instance, right?

Well, not really. Singleton was defined in a library that was referenced by the executing app and the app is loading the same library into the separate app domain. So we end up with one app, 2 app domains and 2 instances of the same assembly loaded into separate app domains.

So calls to the singleton occur from 2 different app domains and it should be expected from singleton to have only one instance. Right? Well... Reality is different from theory. We end up with 2 (two) instances of the singleton in the same app. Really inconvenient.

The solution was to define singleton in the base assembly that is referenced by the main class library.. In this case we are having only one instance of the assembly loaded in the app and hence only one singleton.

This leads to 3 conclusions:
1 - Expect unexpected
2 - AppDomains can REALLY be used as great isolation blocks
3 - Actually, there are implementations of cross app domains singletons, which can be used in a case when you need one to be really shared among different app domains and possibly even multiple apps

Serialization in .Net.. Google still ahead?

Hello,
Just took a look at potobuf - 'serialization' protocol from google.
Here are performance test results from google (using 2 different protobuf libraies for .Net):

http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/wiki/Performance

And links to the libraries:
Protbuf-Net
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/
And Proto#:
http://code.google.com/p/protosharp/

And other 3rd-party add-ons for protocol buffers:
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/wiki/ThirdPartyAddOns


P.S. Can't wait to try it in my own projects.

Best!
Sergei