So it has been 30 days since I turned off the cable to the house and started watching nothing but technical content that I could pull from the Internet. A lot of my friends kept waiting for me to move back into my parent's basement since they felt watching so much Tech would turn me into the ultimate nerd. Luckily that did not happen, but I didn't completely watch just technical stuff the whole thirty days. I would say that my daughter put up with it for about two weeks and then she demanded that...
I have been playing around with the Live Mesh Community Techology Preview, and have been doing what I think is some pretty cool stuff with it (as a consumer), so I thought I'd post something about it. First off, and let's get this out of the way up front, this is NOT "another Ray Ozzie Notes/Groove". What's available today looks and feels like Groove (or FolderShare), but that's only because this is the first implementation of something written on top of the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). Today...
Sometimes when defining a property for a domain model element you may need to use a complex type that has more than one property or can't easily be displayed using a single text field or drop down in the property editor. A good example might be a class that holds a list of strings for a GUI interface or a Rich Text editor for a custom text field required by your framework. To resolve this you can create a custom editor and hook it into your domain model that will provide a proper user interface...
"A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The specified network name is no longer available.) " This is what has been causing issues with the site this weekend. Thankfully the hospital has good WiFi and my cell's bluetooth connection to the HSDPA network from AT&T makes being able to debug the servers ok. However, we will be in the hospital the rest of the day and going home tomorrow...
The ASP.NET web.config file has a location element with the attribute allowOverride. You can use it to prevent child directories from overriding the settings specific in the web.config file.
Although, it's a handy feature to have when you're testing/debugging, you should avoid using it because it can lead to less maintainable applications - somebody would scratch their heads over why their settings aren't taking effect...
Since the downtime at GWB, I've been cooking up content that has been going onto my BlogSpot mirror and I've been too lazy to paste them all here one-at-a-time so here are the links:
Model View Controller (MVC) Design Pattern
http://knitinr.blogspot.com/2008/07/model-view-controller-mvc-design.html
Yet Another Twitter-Cline: Identi.ca launched
http://knitinr.blogspot.com/2008/07/identica-launched-yesteday.html
Error Pages: ReddIt and Acromedia
http://knitinr.blogspot.com/2008/07/error-pages-reddit-and-acromedia.html
I...
Over the past year, Microsoft has broadly touted their partnership with NBC and the video feeds they will provide for the Olympics. So on July 4th, I sat back and while watching their TV broadcast and went over to their website http://www.nbcolympics.com. The first thing you may notice upon visiting the website, is that their homepage is lackluster and that they are using the same drab Adobe Flash photo view. So where's the cool new Microsoft Silverlight technology? Hopefully the following will...
As the Grand Poobah of Visual Basic at Microsoft, Paul is one of the busiest guys I know. Fortunately for us, he managed to find the time to answer these NINE Questions.
1. So, inquiring minds want to know, where are you from?
Originally, Durham, NC. But I’ve been in Seattle almost as long as I was in Durham so…
2. Who do you work for? Give me the 10 second pitch on them. Why would I want to buy their product?
A small technology company in Redmond, WA. You probably haven’t heard of...
“Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software” is a new eBook by Karl Seguin. The book does not say in its introduction that it’s all ALT.NET-ish, it starts by introducing what ALT.NET is, it's goals etc, afterwards, all the topics the book covers are inspired by ALT>NET frequent topics. This includes Domain Driven Design (DDD), Dependency Injection (DI), Object Relational Mapping (ORMs), Mocking, etc… Here’s what Channel9 had to say about it (which is how I originally found it too):...
Michael Washington on prompting for install, Peter McGrattan updated his Stock List Demo, Joel Neubeck on Timeline Markers, Alex Knight DeepZooming, David Anson on LayoutTransoform, and Tim Heuer on Silverlight.js & FF3.
Christopher Bennage has an interesting WPF article on TemplateBinding that if not directly related to SL, it's close.
A couple days ago I referenced the Silverlight 2 RefCard from DZone, and since then have gotten a copy of the PDF file... this is very nicely done......
A tour of the current state of the office, and one of the server rooms, where most racks are now empty or near-empty.
An Epic moment. Gert-Jan uninstalls Citrix on the last 2 servers in the farm, effectively ending 6 years of the 2000-user, 60-server Metaframe XP Citrix farm that served our Netherlands users. I would have had Marcel do this, but he has gone on holiday.
Various IBM servers and almost all the blades lie ready to be moved to the new location. We don't have a use for any of...
Every software architect or technical lead has to consider the possibility of a change in the requirements and thus the software and has to build a system resilient to such change. He/she would also have to design a system that is easy to implement and easy to modify. One such area is dealing with the enumerations when defining the detailed design of the application.
When a method accepts input that is from a small set of values, it is generally a good idea to accept that input as an enumeration...
If, like me you are trying to run tests against your web services and you the error below, you will need to give permission to the service account that runs your Build Agent to create listeners in IIS. Class Initialization method TestServiceProjects.RentalCentreServiceRemoteTest.MyClassInitialize threw exception. System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException: System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException: HTTP could not register URL http://+:3456/RentalCentreServiceRemoteTest/. Your process...
I've been using Google Desktop Search for some time now. Most of it however, I don't find useful. I never search my desktop, and store my mail on a different server, so I miss out on a lot of the Google Desktop value proposition. So why use it at all? The answer is Google Quick Search. Google Quick Search is the little dialog that pops up whenever you press Ctrl twice. I enter a phrase and hit enter and the phrase is automatically sent to the Google search page, rendering the search results...
I’ve been spending the better part of two days doing this same process over and over. It doesn’t feel like I’m testing anything of value.
I am not doing it in the C# 3.0ish way, but it is better to explain it that way.
I have a class and a façade (MyFacade) that I want to extend and test.
class Foo {
public string Name { get; set; }
}
class MyFacade {
public IMyDependancy Depend { get; set; }
}
interface IMyDependancy {
IList<Foo> GetAllFoos();
}
So I write...
I went to see WALL-E earlier this week (Yes, I know it's supposed to be a dot and not a dash. Call it a hardware limitation.)
I wasn't in a big hurry to see this movie. The sense of urgency that I felt for Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, The Dark Knight, etc this summer so far, just wasn't there. It was more like "oh look, WALL-E is playing. Well, I've seen everything else TWICE, so why not?"
My daughters are in from Atlanta for most of the summer, so we're seeing a lot of movies. They...
Posted By:Chris Williams
|
|
7/4/2008 9:21 AM
| 0 Comments |
|
|
This month is kind of a big deal (to me) here in the Twin Cities. We're launching not one, but TWO developer related groups.
The first one is my own project, the Twin Cities Developers Guild. (www.twincitiesdevelopersguild.com) Our kickoff meeting is on Tuesday, July 8 at 6pm (with our Kickoff Cookout starting at 5pm) at New Horizons of Minnesota (in Edina) and features Jason Bock (Magenic) speaking on "Writing Better Code."
Later in the week, on Thursday, July 10 at 5:30pm, the Twin Cities...
Posted By:Chris Williams
|
|
7/4/2008 8:57 AM
| 0 Comments |
|
|
Here is another cool one….at least to me. In my test classes I’ve been trying to fake out my dependencies instead of mock them…just for a change and most of the time I don’t really want to assert how the class used the dependency, just that it gives me the correct result.
I create nested private classes using ReSharper. It puts it at the bottom of my current class which is fine. However, all that is noise to me for the most part, so I moved them to a partial class. I have MyClassTests and MyClassFakes,...
My earlier post on the Null Object pattern led to a few critiques about the fact that I was presenting an extension method to do what is essentially a very simple logical test, and, as a result, doesn’t provide much value. For reference, here is the original extension method from that post public static class NullObjectExtenstions
{
public static bool IsNull(this object source)
{
return (source == null);
}
}
Yes, this is an extremely simple method and performs...
My post on the Null Object pattern has generated some interesting dialog. One of the trends that I have seen is the idea that defensive programming means your code should fail as early as possible. I couldn’t agree less. According to Wikipedia, Defensive programming is a form of defensive design intended to ensure the continuing function of a piece of software in spite of unforeseeable usage of said software. The idea can be viewed as reducing or eliminating the prospect of Murphy's Law having...
Soooo... I've been playing around with WPF for a while now, generally building small apps for peeps at work, or my own stuff, and one of the things that happens in quite a few cases is the dreaded 'data retrieval' phase. During said phase, the app will go into a state of nothingness whilst the data is retrieved, at which point it'll come back and be useable again.
Now, we all know the way to keep the UI active is to multi-thread that bad boy, and that's where I'm at.
In the app I'm thinking of,...
It is a well-known principle of software design to have minimal coupling between abstractions. Twenty years ago, this dialogue would have not made sense to me. Although, object-Oriented Reengineering remains an interesting research field with lots of problems to be solved and with plenty of possibilities to interact with other research communities (Agreeable Concatenation looks at this topic in a different way). In spite of this, to be fair, this story is similar to the one told when components first...
While GeeksWithBlogs was down, I was able to continue blogging thanks to the blog hosting service provided by Blogger.com for my blog mirror. I posted an article there comparing jQuery Corner with the AJAX Control Toolkit, which you can read about at:
http://knitinr.blogspot.com/2008/07/rounded-corners-comparing-jquery-with.html...
