Vincent Grondin

48 Posts | 22 Comments

Hi, my name is Vincent Grondin and I'm a senior consultant at Fujitsu, a consulting firm in Montreal, Québec. I'm starting that blog to share some of my thoughts and knowledge on .NET architectures and code. Being a consultant in the .NET world I come across many different things. Some good, some bad and others that are worth a blog post here whether they be good, or hmmm... shall I say, less good :) I hope you enjoy yourself while learning new stuff. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me anytime.

Vincent Grondin

Apr 15

Aurelia comes to Montreal !

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On monday April 13th if you are in the Montreal region you have the opportunity to see the next generation of Web Apps in action with Rob Eisenberg and his new product: Aurelia. This event already has over 125 registered participants, hurry up, space is limited. http://www.meetup.com/msdevmtl/events/220314283/

Posted On Monday, April 6, 2015 12:45 PM

Jul 14

.NET hacks you shouldn’t be using in your code

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So I’m looking at an application that I need to update for a client and I stumble on a piece of code that works (no denial there it does work) but shouldn’t be so obscure… I know we all have written code that was sub-par at some point in our life and to some extend we sometimes still write some for various reasons, laziness being the most common IMO. ......

Posted On Sunday, July 6, 2014 10:10 PM

Jun 14

Tricky situation with EF and Include while projecting (Select / SelectMany)

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Hello, the other day I stumbled on a problem I had a while back with EF and Include method calls and decided this was it and I was going to blog about it… This would sort of to pin it inside my head and maybe help others too ! So I was using DBContext and wanted to query a DBSet and include some of it’s associations and in the end, do a projection to ......

Posted On Saturday, June 7, 2014 4:27 PM

May 14

So you want to move your TFS collection… read this first!

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At my former client we needed to move the TFS collection from one TFS server to another. If you want to do the same thing, you need to start looking at the official procedure for doing so. If you are using the LAB Manager, then you will need to re-create all your VMs into the Lab (they might still be on SCVMM but not inside Hyper-v at least mine weren’t ......

Posted On Sunday, May 4, 2014 2:51 PM

Apr 14

Optimizing your Self Tracking Entities

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Here’s a quick tip on how to optimize your .NET 4.0 Self Tracking Entities. On our last project at Fujitsu we ended up having to load hundreds of thousands of entities in collections of some of our STEs. Don’t ask us why we did it because the answer is “this is how the client wanted it”. If you did that in the past, you know that loading that many entities ......

Posted On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 9:41 PM

Apr 14

Are your WPF Apps leaking memory? Maybe it’s a feature of WPF!

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So our WPF app that we’ve been building for the past 18 months had memory leaks and we needed to find and fix them. I’m not going to talk about how to find them (aside from mentioning you should get a good 3rd party memory profiler tool) and will focus on a rule we ended up checking throughout our entire application to avoid memory leaks. First off ......

Posted On Monday, April 28, 2014 10:05 PM

Apr 14

How I implement the Singleton pattern in .NET

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I thought I'd give my point of view regarding the singleton pattern and how I prefer creating the pattern in .NET. Some pepole will argue that the way I do it is not the "way it should be done" but again, I will point to: this is only my way of doing it, not THE only way everyone should do it. In this post, I'm not talking about a Singleton in a system ......

Posted On Sunday, April 27, 2014 10:46 PM

Meeting .NET: The missing link – hypermedia in Web API.

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In Montreal on may the 26th Darrel Miller will come to the .net Montreal usergroup to talk about Hypermedia in Web API. Here's a bit more info about this event : Web API provides a foundation for building HTTP based distributed systems. However the support for generating hypermedia based responses is minimal. This talk will try and fill the gap by providing ......

Posted On Sunday, April 27, 2014 4:07 PM

Apr 14

A full day of architecture conferences in Montreal !

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On Saturday May 10th, our usergroup is offering it's members a full day of conferences on emerging architectures including architectures for cloud based solutions! You have to be a member of .NET Montreal to attend and there is a 10$ fee. All conferences will be in French. http://www.meetup.com/dotnetmontreal/events/134828202/

Posted On Friday, April 18, 2014 2:20 PM

Apr 14

Meeting Azure - Top Azure features every ASP.NET developer should know about

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On Monday April the 28th in Montreal comes the father of the first Azure UserGroup, Bill Wilder. Bill comes from Boston for this event and we know this is going to be a meeting the montreal devs won't want to miss... http://www.meetup.com/dotnetmontreal/events/135071842/

Posted On Sunday, April 13, 2014 11:13 AM

Mar 14

SQL Server 2014 launch event in Montreal !

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On Saturday April the 12th, in the Microsoft Office in Montreal will be a full day of SQL Server 2014 presentation to mark the launch of this great product. The product is actually available on April 1st (no April fool here). For more information checkout: http://www.meetup.com/dotnetmontreal/events/139950192/

Posted On Friday, March 21, 2014 1:02 PM

Mar 14

Surface 2 replaced !!!!

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Hi all, if you have your receipt either paper or hopefully the electronic one sent to your email address, you should be able to walk up to the company store nearest to you and have your Surface 2 replaced for free. Mine got replaced but I had to pull some strings from the MVP program and I tend to believe not every MS Customer is an MVP... It took roughly ......

Posted On Wednesday, March 12, 2014 5:22 PM

Dec 13

No serial number on my brand new surface...

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Hi everyone, I thought I'd share my current experience for those of you who might be in the same position as I am right now being : I own a Microsoft Surface 2 (RT) and cannot find the serial number on it.... So before you reply and tell me how dumb I am for not being able to see the serial number under the stand, please take a deep breath and read ......

Posted On Wednesday, December 18, 2013 9:19 PM

Nov 13

Creating your own dispatcher thread

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I haven't posted here in a while and see the final result is ridiculous... Guess I'll have to learn those fancy posting tags.... Alright I know there are a lot of tools out there built for integration test purpose but I figured I would post what I think could be considered a poor man’s solution for integration testing but which works amazingly well… ......

Posted On Tuesday, November 26, 2013 9:55 PM

Apr 13

Ottawa Code Camp Approaching even FASTER !

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Hello all, just wanted to point out that the Ottawa Code Camp will be held on May 4th 2013 at Algonquin College.My session will be on "Optimizing your 3 tiers apps with current technologies" and we'll take a look at WCF Threading, Tasks Parallel Library and Async-Await pattern.... all that in VS2012... Please note that all this can be done in VS2010 ......

Posted On Tuesday, April 9, 2013 10:44 PM

Apr 13

Dev Teach Toronto coming FAST !

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Announcing DevTeach Toronto / Mississauga, May 27-31, 2013 !Lots of great conferences during the main event and also many pre/post conferences, don't miss out on a training you can't get anywhere else ! http://www.devteach.com ......

Posted On Thursday, April 4, 2013 11:11 PM

Mar 13

Exception handling when using Tasks

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Tasks are very impressive once you manage to wrap your head around a few concepts. One subject I’d like to cover in this post is how to deal with exceptions in tasks. There are a few pitfalls one must not fall into when dealing with exception handling in tasks. First you must remember that each task is responsible for its own error checking or error ......

Posted On Saturday, March 30, 2013 7:46 AM

Jan 13

How I got burned with Automation Ids and virtualized content in XAML controls...

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Not so long ago on our project at work we had to create shared steps in Microsoft Test Managerfor playback later on. The screen we used contained 2 instances of the same custom made comboboxboth displaying a list of countries. One was located at the top of the screen and the other one at the bottom.The combobox already supported Automation IDs and could ......

Posted On Saturday, January 5, 2013 9:34 PM

Sep 12

Files for .NET Montreal and VTCC4 conference

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Hi, here are the files for both the .NET Montreal presentation made Sept the 24th and at the Vermont Code Camp #4 on Sept the 22nd regarding Architecture problems and solutions linked to EF4.0, Async-await keywords and the Task Parallel Library. This zip file includes both power points in french and english and the DemoApplication which is I REMIND ......

Posted On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:11 PM

Jul 12

Learning the hard way: Uninstalling .NET Framework 4.5RC

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Uninstalling the .NET Framework 4.5RC can be a real mess, let me explain… I had a perfectly functional VM on which I tried to install the 4.5RC version of the .NET framework to test out some of the new features of EF. Since what I wanted to test didn’t work and since I THOUGHT 4.5 and 4 where side by side, I decided to go back to simply 4 and uninstall ......

Posted On Tuesday, July 17, 2012 8:50 PM

Jul 12

Multiple instances of Intellitrace.exe process

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Not so long ago I was confronted with a very bizarre problem… I was using visual studio 2010 and whenever I opened up the Test Impact view I would suddenly see my pc perf go down drastically… Investigating this problem, I found out that hundreds of “Intellitrace.exe” processes had been started on my system and I could not close them as they would re-start ......

Posted On Monday, July 9, 2012 9:00 PM

Apr 12

DevTeach Vancouver approaching fast !

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Just a friendly reminder for people in the Vancouver area that DevTeach Vancouver is just a few weeks away ! Registration is open and I can't help but promoting a full day of TFS 2010 workshop given by Etienne Tremblay and myself plus we will most likely add extra material to cover for TFS vNext... The four added topics will be:Moving from TFS 2010 ......

Posted On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 10:41 PM

Apr 12

Coded UI Test Builder Visual Cues Offset

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Wow it's been a long time since I posted anything in here..... Today I'll be very brief because the subject is quite easy to cover but can be quite puzzling when it happens to you... These days at work I'm exploring Coded UI Test in VS2010, Microsoft Test Manager 2010 and Microsoft Test Runner 2010 which is cool because I've been digging aroung VS2010 ......

Posted On Monday, April 16, 2012 8:28 PM

Sep 11

A full day of Azure conferences...

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On October the 15th, the Montreal .NET User Group will hold a special event... a full day of conferences and workshops on Azure ! The speakers for the special event will be our very own Guy Barrette, Azure MVP, Sébastien Warin also and Azure MVP and Cory Fowler who just happens to be yet another Azure MVP ! Ain't that just amazing to see how many of ......

Posted On Sunday, September 25, 2011 10:17 PM