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Mobile applications are rarely totally self-contained - they often need to use data from various online sources. This article describes how to pull XML content from a RSS feed, and show it in a ListBox container. This is nothing new, so we’ll try to spice it up a bit by adding a simple loading screen that is shown to the user while our XML data is being downloaded and parsed.

Last week I was faced with a problem where one of our ASP.NET apps caused long waiting times between callbacks in a certain situation. After exhausting all the troubleshooting tools and ideas, yet again I had to turn to WinDbg as a last resort. The results quite suprisingly reveiled a cuplrit in a tiny, innocent looking Linq lambda expression piece of code...

We received a lots of comments and questions regarding the data access layer in MonoX. Many of our new users never heard about LLBLGen Pro - an Object Relational Mapping tool of our choice, and they consider it as too exotic.

MonoX lets you choose the DAL generation tool that will be used in your portal projects. We used various ORMs in our projects (NHibernate, Subsonic, ...) but LLBLGen remains our favorite due to the richness of its features and the very high level of the support provided by its authors. Of course, we don't want to avoid LINQ - MonoX was concieved when LINQ was in the alpha stage, but we quickly started to adopt it. Essentially, LLBLGen still offers a richer set of features, but if you are in doubt, guys from Solutions Design recently developed Linq to LLBLGen - now you can use both technologies interchangeably.