Once of the common pain points for me as a developer is deploying database changes from my development environment (generally my laptop) out to a test/staging server.  It's not always a great idea to just blow away the test/staging database and replace it with my local copy, as there may be other things in place that I don't want to get rid of.  Besides, there are usually differences between the security/user configurations on my local machine as compared to my test/staging servers.

Aptera is proud to announce a new relationship with JFNew.  JFNew is one of the leading natural resources and ecological consulting firms in the United States, providing habitat restoration, natural resource management, native plant materials, construction, maintenance and full-service ecological solutions for their clients throughout the Great Lakes region. JFNew’s reputation for high quality environmental services can be tracked through 20 years of experience in providing sound environmental solutions.  Aptera’s focus on high standards matches well with JFNew’s priorities, and we look forward to enhancing their online presence and complimenting their established reputation.

Earlier this evening, I had the privilege of collaborating with my teammate Brock in presenting highlights from Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 to our fellow Aptera developers. After Brock brought the house down with his overview of new language features and a deep-dive into 2010's outrageous Historical Debugging feature, I brought the team up to date on the wonders of modern Parallel Programming using the Tasks Parallel Library and PLINQ.

If you wish to perform a closer examination of them, you may download my materials from the talk here. This archive contains:

• The Powerpoint Presentation
• Full source ...

I was debugging some Classic ASP code recently, as part of building out a new development server, and I ran across an error that I hadn't seen before:

Is Parallel.ForEach the New Black?

The forthcoming release of version 4 of the .NET CLR includes quite a few spiffing features, from Background Garbage Collection and Historical Debugging to Auto-Implemented Properties and underscore-free line breaks in VB. But perhaps one of the more head-turning items is the new Task Parallel Library (formerly known as the Parallel Framework Extensions, or PFX), and its prominent representative, the System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel class.

If this is the first you are hearing of this new Parallel framework, put down whatever you are drinking, because you'll only end up spit-taking it all over your bulky off-white ...