Learn to create custom data validations in this video excerpt from Julie Lerman’s course “Data Layer Validation with Entity Framework 4.1+“. In this video Julie shows how to use the IValidatableObject interface to provide custom class level validation in Entity Framework 4.1.
Julie Lerman is a leading independent authority on the Entity Framework and is the author of the highly acclaimed books “Programming Entity Framework”, “Programming Entity Framework CodeFirst”, and the upcoming “Programming Entity Framework DbContext”. She is a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker, a frequent presenter at technical conferences and she also writes articles for many well-known technical publications, including authoring the Data Points column in MSDN Magazine.
If you’d like to learn more about how to perform advanced data layer validation in Entity Framework, this course is a must view. What validation methods do you use for data in your apps? Hit the comment links below and let us know.
Since we all have an extra day this year, we thought we’d put it to good use. We’re opening up the entire Pluralsight library for free!
That’s right, you heard me. Absolutely FREE.
For 24 hours, starting Wednesday February 29, at 12:00AM EST ( 05:00 UTC) the Pluralsight library will be wide open. You will be able to watch as much as you can in 24 hours!
No need to register. No need to provide a credit card.
The entire library is completely free for this one day.
Follow @pluralsight on Twitter to find out about other great offers like this, and feel free to Tweet this offer to everyone you know.
A number of devices, including the Kindle Fire, were failing to properly open the player due to a problem with our OpenGL initialization that seems to have surfaced in 0.85. This build fixes that problem and also removes the NEON support that we’d hoped would fix some stutter problems but actually ends up crashing some devices due to a lack of proper CPU detection. To make a long story short, NEON support is something the Android platform doesn’t seem to handle very cleanly at the moment and it’ll take more work on our part before we can try this again.
If you’d like to help beta test 0.88, first uninstall the old application, then sideload the new one:
If our FFmpeg-based player (0.85+) is not working on your device, we also have our old player available (0.79), which you can continue to use until we get the kinks worked out:
Leap Day is going to be a big day for fans of Windows 8, and not just because of the possibility of upcoming promos from Pluralsight that might just include some great free stuff (stay tuned!). Tomorrow February 29th, Microsoft will be launching the Windows 8 Consumer Preview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. After the launch, consumers all over the world will be able to download a beta version of Windows 8 for their own testing, development, ridicule, etc.
But are the beta bits really ready for prime-time? Do you trust the Consumer Preview enough to install it on your primary PC? Or are you going to relegate it to your brother’s old laptop that is still missing the “K” key? Let us know what you think in the poll below and of course feel free to hit us up in the comments are.
Would you like to more about cloud computing and what it can do for your organization? In this video excerpt from David Chappell’s course “Cloud Computing: Seeing The Big Picture” you’ll learn what factors should be considered in evaluating cloud computing for your own use.
David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates. Through his speaking, writing, and consulting, he helps people around the world understand, use, and make better decisions about new technology. David has been the keynote speaker for more than a hundred conferences and events on five continents, and his seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of IT leaders, architects, and developers in forty-five countries. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, and educate their customers and staff.
If you’d like to learn to see the big picture of cloud computing, this course is for you. We’d also like your views on what you think the big picture of cloud computing is, so hit the comment links and let us know what you think.
Learn how to perform client-side data templating with jQuery Templates.
The jQuery Template plug-in is a small JavaScript library that enables data templating, and is especially convenient when building Ajax-enabled applications.
I woke up this morning and found a newsletter from Amazon sitting in my Inbox. The newsletter as you can imagine is full of words like “Great Deal” and “Gold Box Buy” and was announcing an upcoming video game sale. Being a bit of a gamer-nerd, I’ll admit I bit and hit the link. When I got to the webpage, it too was covered in banners touting “Great Deals” and “Gold Box Buys”. However, there wasn’t a single video game on the page. Not one. What I did see where products like watches, TVs, PC cables, and power drills. This was a bit of déjà vu since I had recently been to Amazon and searched for these exact types of products. I was quite pleased after clicking on several of the links to find a nice drill. Add to cart!
Now this isn’t news to anybody who has been online in the past five years. Using search and personal information gathered while browsing to provide targeted marketing is fairly common in most sophisticated sites that host advertisements. Advertisers expect their ads to be targeted and publishers want to provide their customers with useful information that increase sales. The more personal information the publisher has about you, the more valuable you are to advertisers.
Why then did I, and many, many others, have such a negative reaction to the fact that Google was using information from their services, including Gmail, Google+, and YouTube to target ads in their search and service sidebars? Since Google announced their new “streamlined” privacy rules, everyone from Microsoft to the US Attorney General is suddenly interested in how this information is being stored, used, and possibly misused. As a developer, I also found that Google’s bypassing of privacy features in Safari and Internet Explorer to be a fairly blatant thumbing of their noses at legitimate attempts to keep my personal information private. Google has fought back against much of the backlash with a blog post but does not deny that they use the content of your emails to target ads.
Fact: No one reads your email but you. Like most major email providers, our computers scan messages to get rid of spam and malware, as well as show ads that are relevant to you.
So again the question I ask is why would I welcome the tracking behavior of a company like Amazon and yet feel violated by nearly the same actions taken by Google? Is it that I inherently trust Amazon more than Google? Not really. To me, it’s all about context. I go to Amazon to shop. The context in which I interact with their site or use their mobile app is that I want to purchase something. In that situation, advertisements are useful tools to direct me to money saving discounts or to highlight a product I might have otherwise not known about. Basically, I show up looking to buy and they try to sell me stuff. The context of the conversation is one of sales and so ads, even targeted ones, don’t seem unusual or out of place.
However, when I’m sending an email to my mother and just happen to mention a keyword like “birthday” it doesn’t mean I want to see greeting card and birthday balloon ads. I’m not shopping and I didn’t intend to “invite” Google into this conversation. This is what I call electronic eavesdropping. It’s like having an over-eager salesmen listen to everything you do and then randomly jump into the conversation with an advertisement. There is no way for an advertisement to appear in this context and not seem out of place and unwanted.
What do you think? Is Google stepping over the line or is this just the real price we pay for “free” services like Google Search and Facebook? Should we even care that Google is storing and indexing every email we ever send or receive in Gmail? I don’t know about you but I’ve received a lot of unsolicited ads in Gmail, and would hate to think that somewhere in Google’s vast database is my name next to keywords like “Penis Enlargement” or “Cheap Viagra”.
