General
Anything that doesn't fit into any other category.
Read the introductory post here first.
So, you found an open source project you really like, it saves you a lot of time, takes some friction away from your life, saves you money and you’re full of admiration and gratitude to the people who spend their free time working on it, so that you can stand on their shoulders. You feel like you really should give back to them, or to the (rest of the) community around the project, but you don’t really want or can do the obvious – start fixing bugs or implementing new features, so you don’t. But...
Once in a while I talk to someone who sais something like this: “I love open source, especially project X – I would love to contribute back, but I don’t know how”. There are different variations. “I am not a programmer”, “I don’t understand the code – it’s so vast”, “I wouldn’t know how to submit these patch-things they ask for” etc. To help these people I decided to create a small (seriously – 3 posts, excluding this one) series about contributing to open source projects. I hope this will help more people get involved as they realize how...
I did not abandon my tutorial on Dynamic Proxy. However do not expect to hear a lot from me on this blog during the next two to three weeks, since I don't have an Internet access at home during that period, and I won't be able to blog too much. Same goes for emails.
The only form of Internet access I have now is using my neighbor's Wifi, that I can access only in the kitchen using my 10 inch MSI Wind netbook. Not the most ideal set up for blogging as you'll surely agree.
So as a sneak peak, here's a...
I don't usually do that, but here's Ayende' presentation from last year's Oredev conference (yes, it says 2007, but it really is from 2008).
It's fun, very informative if you don't know Active Record, and of surprisingly good quality (means you can actually hear what Ayende is saying, and see the code). Most of all, this is an awesome presentation.
How many times have you gone to a presentation when presenter said "Give me a domain model that you want to work on" and then went and implemented it!
It's a must see. Highly recommended. And if you register to viddler, you can...
My team at work is far from agile, but I’m trying to smuggle some ideas and practices, according to the old Latin proverb “gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo”. Recently, as a small way of continuous improvement I suggested each week we print some Visual Studio or ReSharper keyboards shortcut, that we didn’t know or use, and which can help us do some things a little bit faster. Here’s the first one: It’s pinned to a cork whiteboard in a location that everyone looks at it few times a day. Hopefully by...
Creating multilingual applications is a huge topic. There are whole books devoted to it, and if you’re serious about it, you should definitely read those, because what you see on surface, is only the tip of an iceberg. If you only want to play with localization or need a quick reference, hopefully this post will help. Fist thing is, .NET is really well thought of if it comes to localization, so if you know what you’re doing, it’s pretty painless to create application that will be easy to translate to other languages (localization is a LOT bigger topic...
I read a lot of blogs. I love them. However, I believe they are not the best medium if you want to learn something from A to Z. That said, here’s my wishlist of books that I wish existed. “Creating maintainable software architecture” – Oren Eini “Maintainable software development” – Oren Eini “Advanced Windows Communication Foundation from the inside” – Nicholas Allen “Building service oriented software” – Udi Dahan “Presentation patterns with WPF” – Glenn Block (There is more broad book “Presentation Patterns” to...
Sorry for the daring topic, but that’s really what comes to my mind when I read or hear people whining about C# loosing purity/object-orientation/strongly-typedness/goal/insert your favorite here, with the advent of version 4.0. To sum it up, there are four major new areas of improvement coming up with the forthcoming version of the language, as outlined by Charlie Calvert in "New Features in C# 4.0". dynamic keyword (type) along with all its implications. Optional and named parameters. Co/Contra-variance of generics Few additional features geared towards easing...
Many people visiting my site (myself included) have stumbled upon this error message: I took some time yesterday and, since Subtext is an open source project, I looked into the code trying to find what’s causing it, and fixed it. I don’t know Subtext’s architecture all that well, so I may have broken something on the way. My error log shows no exceptions (as compared to quite a few a day before the fix), so either people stopped visiting my site, or I fixed it without breaking anything else. If I’m wrong, and you...
Really? Is The Dark Knight the best film ever? Come on… And if it really is half as good as they say, why do I have to wait two more weeks to see it Technorati Tags: The Dark Knight, Movies
SourceForge has implemented OpenId, and as you can read here, they're very proud of it. You've been asking for it, and now you get it - SourceForge.net has implemented OpenID. It's a great way to let you cutting-edge web users to more easily get involved on our site. This helps you participate in the Open Source community - whether you're helping out in project trackers, starting a new project, or just throwing down in the Community forums. We're helping you to help us help you some more. As we all know, the main and greatest advantage of OpenId is...
Today I found post from Ayende, called What I did on 2005. It's a repository of links to posts from his blog in 2005 summing up the most important things he did. With posts like "Learned to use Subversion", "Got into testing UI", "published first OSS project". It got me thinking - to get good at something you have to start somewhere. No one is great right from the start, and everyone has to start somewhere. I'm not sure why but I found it very positive.
Ok, in case anyone cares, I set up an account on Twitter. I'm trying to set it up, and figure out why people seem to love it so much. I downloaded an Adobe AIR-powered client called Twihrl, and I find its UI experience... different. I also put a Twitter widget on the blog. We'll see what hatches out of this. Technorati Tags: Twitter, Adobe AIR
I found those images great analogy to how, we not-so-humble programmers learn: languages, design, frameworks. (All images by Chris Jordan). For the sake of discussion let's use learning a language, as an example. This can be however extended to anything. First, we read, or hear about that new cool language. So we grab some introductory book, or attend a presentation on it. After a day or two, one might say confidently to himself: It's great, my hello world runs flawlessly and I'm proud of myself. Life's good. I know the syntax, I know how the syntax for while...
I did a little experiment today. I went to biggest job-offering web site in Poland, and searched by keyword: agile. That's all, I didn't specify city, salary, branch nothing, just the keyword. Here's what I got: The grand total of 11 offerings. 5 of them (underlined in green) abroad, 6 in Poland (blue). Out of those 6 only one is in Krakow - the city where I live. I don't know what to think about it, but it makes me sad. Technorati Tags: Agile, Job
ALT.NET is a wonderful movement. It's a bunch of very smart and open minded people valuing good practices and using common set of tools. It's discussion group is a great place to share ideas and ask for tips and help. It's all great, however there's one thing that bothers me. The site says: We are a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development. It's true. However, as much as I feel strongly about patterns, practices and tools advocated by the...
Globalization is a serious issue if you create a software that is to be used worldwide. You may for example take into account that people have non a-z letters in their names, like for example 'ź'. If you don't consider that, your users may come across windows like this one, I saw while registering to Windows Live Spaces. So what should I do? Lie about my last name? And the funniest thing is: there's no 'ź' on the list of forbidden characters. Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Office, Globalization, l10n, i13n
I'm speechless. Technorati Tags: Johnny Lee, Ted, Wii
I'm having a bad day... really. First CC.NET website wouldn't work just when I need it, and now this... How come, when I download Bil Simser's TreeSurgeon, I get empty files in my zip, but when I browse the repository they have some content? Technorati Tags: CodePlex, TreeSurgeon
Today I had to tear apart and refactor one of core pieces of tool I'm working on. Oh, and I had to do it fast. At first, I was like: "Hey, you can't change that, it was supposed to stay the way it is now!". Next I started to refactor, changing one by one, all the pieces I needed to change in order to achieve desired effect. I was refactoring, compiling, testing... and again refactoring, compiling, testing.... And ultimately when all tests were once again green - I knew I was done. I felt confident. Thanks to TDD and...
Those of you who visited my blog yesterday might have noticed that it was down. I fixed problem with Subtext's export to BlogML I blogged about recently, and I decided to take a plunge, leave Subtext behind and move to BlogEngine.net. As you may notice if you read it on the website, not as RSS, I ended up rolling back to Subtext. BlogEngine by default does not use SQL database, but stores everything in XML. If I wanted to keep on using my database, I needed to do the following: Add connection string to web.config Change default provider from...
I've been using Subtext for this blog since its very beginning 10 months ago. Back then I installed what was the latest version (1.9.5 with later security-fix). I was pretty happy with it. I don't have high needs: it is supported by Windows Live writer, is stable and just works. However I've been receiving emails from people complaining that they cant post comments to my blog. I checked the issue, and I was able to reproduce it, with error message presented on the screenshot. I googled for it, but I didn't find out anything useful. I decided to upgrade my...
One of the hottest news in last week was end of HD formats war. HD-DVD got dropped, Blu-Ray people are more than happy, but days of their format are counted as well. Arguably Blu-Ray won't even last as long as DVD (12 years and counting). Here's why: Optical disks gained popularity in times, where CPM (cost per megabyte) of using them was way lower than HDD. Hard disks had capacities like 2GB, and buying three CDs 650MB each was way cheaper. It was economically reasonable to buy CDs, and keep your files there. I don't recall the numbers but I'm...
While most applications come with installer, there are many, that don't. They are usually a single .zip, .rar or .7z file, that you can extract to some directory on your hard drive, and that's it. They just work. One such example is NDepend, which comes only in this form. Many other applications, like Notepad++ give you choice: you can either get installation package, or a .zip file. Each approach comes with its own set of advantages, and disadvantages. Zip/rar packages, are usually smaller downloads, and it definitely maters for people with dial-up connections. All depends on the particular application, but...
Technorati Tags: ReSharper
Ok, seriously - I might be just the only blogger in Poland that hasn't written anything about Nasza-klasa.pl in the passing year. It's basically social networking site where you write all schools you went to, and it helps you find people from the same school, the same class and so on. It's been a huge success here in Poland, and everyone is talking about it, even my mom knows what it is, and that's quite an achievement. Well, anyway - my wife seems to like it, and she spends quite a lot of time there, and she found this on...
I'm not going to do this often but I just found out who said one sentence that I just adore and I wanted to store it here for further reference. As far as the customer is concerned, the Interface is the product. Jef Raskin This is so true, and yet too often user experience is so low on project's priority list. There's another quote on this: Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.Jef Raskin Technorati Tags: UX, User Experience, GUI, quotes
"Better is the enemy of the good", says old Polish proverb. I can NOT see how Vista might be better for me than my Xp. I am perfectly happy with Xp, it works smoothly, I don't remember when was the last time it crashed, it supports all the hardware that I use, it uses reasonable amount of resources - all in all - it's the best OS I ever used. On the other hand there's this new Vista thing. So what? I have been using it for like a month, as my 2nd OS, and then I removed it, because...
The strangest thing happened to me today. I left my PC running yesterday when I left from work, I came today and started working only to find out that my keyboard shortcuts were not working. I went to Tools-->Settings and wanted to re-map my keyboard scheme, but instead of seeing Visual Studio Settings window, I saw "There was a problem and application will be terminated, do you want to send a report to Microsoft bla bla bla" window. "Ok", I thought, "shit happens", I ran Visual Studio once again... Tools-->Settings... Error. Hmmm... maybe restarting Windows would help. Well, not...
I've just listen to new .NET Rocks podcast with Don Box, and Chris Sells about, well - about myriad of things, but main topic was technical books and ways of learning new technologies. They mostly focused on shrinking market of books, as blogs become more popular and people gain their knowledge from blogs more and more and less from books. However, I thing there is one difference that they barely touched, although it's the most important one. There will be place for books, and not only as a way to get the zen of a technology, but as a...
It seems that Jamie Cansdale's case is attracting attention not only in .NET world. Today I noticed that biggest Polish IT news portal dobreprogramy.pl published a news about it entitled "Microsoft sends out lawyers to community". It's good that case is getting famous, because it may trigger wider debate about vague software licenses. Technorati tags: Jamie Cansdale, TestDriven.NET, Microsoft, Work Around Technical Limitations
I found this test via Mads Kristensen's blog. My result: Your programmer personality type is:DHTB You're a Doer.You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.You like coding at a High level.The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.You work best in a Team.A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is...
Mostly to get some statistics, I moved my direct feed to Feedburner. I am impressed by the wealth of options they have there. I played with it a bit, added email subscription if someone prefers it over RSS/Atom. If you find any errors in it or have any suggestions, please let me know :) Technorati tags: Feedburner, rss, atom, feed
You know who Krzysztof Cwalina is - right? The Framework Design guy. He recently gave a lecture on that topic at Microsoft Research center, and now he made it available for download. I haven't seen it whole yet (it's iver 3h long!) but i strongly recomend it. Get it here, and if you didn't already - subscribe to Krzysztof's blog: here. Technorati tags: Krzysztof Cwalina, .NET, .NET framework, design, lecture, Microsoft
Microsoft released 2nd beta of Windows Live Writer yesterday. That's good, I used 1st beta to publish my posts and I tried to publish previous post with the new version but there seems to be some API incompatibility issue between WLW and SubText, since when I tried to publish it, it Subtext threw this exception: Server Error 0 Occurred Illegal Characters Found at Subtext.Framework.Text.HtmlHelper.HasIllegalContent(String s) at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.FormatEntry(Entry e, Boolean UseKeyWords) at Subtext.Framework.Data.DatabaseObjectProvider.Create(Entry entry, Int32[] categoryIds) at Subtext.Framework.Entries.Create(Entry entry) at Subtext.Framework.XmlRpc.MetaWeblog.newPost(String blogid, String username, String password, Post post, Boolean publish) I guess I'll stick to beta 1 for now....
I'm preparing an overview of xUML, MDA and UML, how they fit together and most of all about advantages and disadvantages of using this methodology. I googled a little bit and although in theory those look pretty promising, I really couldn't find much success stories, nor tools supporting xUML (I found only 2: iUML and Cassandra). Generating complete code generated from model seems tempting, so why noone is using it? Is it lack of tools? Or maybe it's all too vague, too imprecise, and people are afraid, that, after all they will have to dive into this generated model and...
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