Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
89 Ways for You to Become the Coolest Programmer in the World
Using IronRuby To Implement Dynamic Business Rules
Co- and contra-variance: how do I convert a List(Of Apple) into a List(Of Fruit)?
MVC Storefront Preview 1 Available
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
I’ve been doing a good deal of Semantic Web work lately and found this to be a handy reference guide for writing SPARQL Queries. It’s a two-page PDF and can be easily printed.
Courtesy of Eric Schoonover at Microsoft.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
If you’re looking for an inexpensive Visual Studio 2008 refactoring add-in that performs many essential refactorings at a price point significantly lower than ReSharper, MojabSoftware’s new Smarties 2008 (goofy name, notwithstanding) may be your ticket to getting the job done. After reviewing the list of core features, I have to say that I’m impressed by the breadth of both refactorings and timesavers packed into the $46US package.
Their website has this to say about Smarties 2008:
Smarties 2008 is designed for professional developers who don’t need the refactor commands that are used just to change the badly written codes by someone else but instead they want something more powerful and at same time affordable to get their jobs done easier.
Their business model is a simple application of the Pareto Principle (80-20 rule). It’s probably worth a closer look if you’re on the fence and for the price probably a no-brainer if you don’t need all the extra shiny stuff from ReSharper.
Thursday, October 4th, 2007
One of the coolest things I’ve heard about today is that Microsoft is planning on making the source code for the .NET Framework Base Class Library (BCL) publicly available. I’m not sure of all the details, but is appears that it will be hosted similar to one of the ways Win32 debug symbols are made available to a developer during a debugging session. Since the Visual Studio .NET debugger can only debug user-mode programs, WinDbg exists which can work in user or kernel mode, This is where one can declaratively configure the path, uri or other location to search for the symbols that will be loaded during a debugging session. This repository is called a symbol server, and can be as simple as a folder on your drive. This way, one always is assured of having them available without having to deal with DLLs scattered all over the drive. I can imagine the scenario for source files exposed in a similar fashion.
The benefit with this is that you’d never again have to worry about stepping off into some .NET framework disassembly goo which can be tedious to navigate through sometimes, especially so without the debug symbols. Having the source code available in a PDB would make debugging a nice coherent experience by just making framework code look just like your code. I know that you can set the option to just show "My Code" when debugging, but having a full-on interactive session would be sweet, I think.
This just in…from a post I just read on Scott Guthrie’s blog I now see that it will, in fact, work exactly as I’ve described above. Apparently VS 2008 will have a debugging configuration option to make the magic happen. Very cool!
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
Something I’ve been struggling with lately is how to reconcile a need for adequate TDD design whilst applying sound pattern-based architecture. I’m really beginning to see why TDD is making my designs much more coherent and maintainable, but using design patterns is second nature and typically doesn’t involve (at least for me) a deliberate effort to flesh out higher level tests. It seems like the TDD aspect kicks in somewhere between the "hey this mediator pattern is a good solution for this" and "I should probably be writing some tests before I get much more code banged out". Maybe the source of my discontent is a lack of discipline very early in the design phase, or maybe some hard-wired need to model with patterns first. Anyway, having recently become deeply interested in using Mock Objects as well as Behavior Driven Development (BDD), I am focusing a lot of cycles thinking about how they are actually just variations of a theme, namely, let the tests drive the rest. I’ve got a lot more to learn here, but I believe that a lot of my pain (and my customers’ too) can be reduced using some of these techniques.
Friday, December 22nd, 2006
A few of the things I’m looking forward to digging into over the Christmas break next week:
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006
Still working on the Linux mailserver. Installed Oracle Unbreakable Linux to see if I like it as much as RedHat or SuSE. Since Oracle appears to be (at least in this first release) simply rebranding RedHat Enterprise 4.0 Linux, I suppose that relatively few variations are outwardly visible. The overall polish of Oracle’s distro is very nice and every bit as sexy as RedHat or SuSE. I am only running Gnome presently so I can’t comment on its KDE integration. Anyway, I’m letting the machine sit idle on my network for a few days to see if any stability issues occur.
Some technology observations from a guy in Indianapolis, IN
