The vortex is drawing me in
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Two months ago I signed up for the Apple Developer program.
Two weeks ago I went to a training on course on iPhone/iPad development.
The last two days I've been reading up on Objective-C and had a flood of long suppressed memories from uni rush back.
Today, I signed up for the cocoa-dev mailing list.
Tomorrow??
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Broken it is, your MacBook Pro
Thursday, 16 September 2010
And now it seems like a good choice to have steered clear of Apple products all these years. I've had this thing (you may deduce from my tone that I'm not happy with it any longer) less than a week and the optical drive is broken. Technical support could not help. So they passed me on to sales to get a replacement. Sales could not help. They had none in stock they said. Although they could give me a refund and I could buy a new one (I'd have to specify a slightly different version that is in stock). So now I'm stuck with a lump of junk. A pretty lump of junk on first blush but getting uglier by the hour.
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Don't get me started on PageUp and PageDown
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Talk about scrapping utility for the frustration. Let's junk some of the Function/Control/Alt/Command key overkill and give back a little love for paging...
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Maximise button, anyone, anyone?
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Sooo, there's a Maximise button in OS X windows somewhere right? Well, maybe not. Turns out this Zoom thingy has been around for a long time and it's looking scarily like I'm not going to find a Maximise button (or even one spelled out US-style: Maximize).
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And so begins life in the Apple world
Thursday, 16 September 2010
The last time I used a Mac was about 15 years ago. I was a tech support lackey at the Flexible Learning Centre in SA. This was a step up from my previous role at the uni where I was responsible for carrying printouts from the VAX computer across campus to the poor souls who had requested the report. Welcome to the world of IT in Adders, circa mid-90's. Sooo, the FLC developed a whole bunch of printed learning materials and had numerous designers and editors beavering away on Macs and I was alternately bemused (bad day) and amazed (good day) at how they worked. Like a duck really, calm and serene on the surface and little webbed feet paddling away furiously underneath, out of view. Or, occasionally just nothing going on above or below. But now I have a Mac Book Pro. It is shiny and makes me feel like I can be a 'real' developer. It's a bit confusing though; after much searching I discovered the Eject key for the DVD drive.And now, I wish I knew where the 'Home' and 'End' keys were.
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Mercurial - don't be late
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
For an ongoing workflow try this out: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jimmy_bogard/archive/2010/07/08/mercurial-workflows-local-development-work.aspx
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Microsoft Service Trace Viewer
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
I don't mind stumbling across these things late in the piece but ideally, there'd be an article that would talk about useful tools like this and you would read that article before starting out on a new technology... But, that's rarely going to happen. So here's my late to the press intro to the Microsoft Service Trace Viewer. To fire it up:Either 1) a) Open a Visual Studio command prompt (Start menu > Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio xxxx > Visual Studio Tools > Microsoft Visual Studio Command Prompt b) And enter svctraceviewer.exe or, 2) Skim thru the SDK for it (a trip thru the Start menu again). Once it's going, choose File > Open or File > Add and choose a trace file that has been exported by the application. To export trace file from application
Add trace element to system.diagnostics element in config file. <system.diagnostics>
<trace autoflush="true" />
<sources>
<source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing" propagateActivity="true">
<listeners>
<add name="sdt" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" initializeData="c:\traceAppName.e2e" />
</listeners>
</source>
</sources>
</system.diagnostics> The e2e extension is short for "end to end" tracing...
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Migration - Sorted
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Touch wood..! Got the last of the known gremlins sorted tonight. Windows Server 2008 R2 and Adobe Reader don't mix - go figure... And my mail server is very picky about casing of the post office name...
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IIS7 gold - AppCmd
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Pure gold: Getting Started with AppCmd.exe
More gold: Creating IIS7 sites, applications, and virtual directories
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Linq2SQL Debug Visualizer
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
I know I'm just about the last cab off the rank on this one but I think the Linq2SQL debug visualizer is pretty nifty. It lets you view the SQL generated by a Linq query while you are debugging in VS2008 - sweet. If that doesn't float your boat you can always use the DataContext.GetCommand() or DataContext.Log() and Log() usage
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Fluent NHibernate is pretty kickass
Monday, 23 November 2009
This FluentNHibernate stuff is pretty good gear. One thing to remember is to always specify an Id throught the Id method. eg Id(x => x.MyIdPropertyName); Otherwise you stand to get an error a little like this:
The element 'class' in namespace 'urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2' has invalid child element 'property' in namespace 'urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2'. List of possible elements expected: 'meta, subselect, cache, synchronize, comment, tuplizer, id, composite-id' in namespace 'urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2'.
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Chapter 15 - Winner, "Chapter? One whole chapter?" award
Friday, 10 July 2009
Mail. Not a small subject I'm sure. But I kinda feel like this chapter glossed over things a little. Although, to be fair, I really did lap up the whole AlternateViews and LinkedResource stuff. I missed out on that last time I got into sending emails. And that stuff looks really neat. Tip for young players; that means I'm thinking blog post material...
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Chapter 14 - Reflection
Friday, 10 July 2009
So this is how they do it - Reflector, Intercept Studio. Talk about scarily amazing. And how neat is this whole, TypeInfo, ConstructorInfo, MethodInfo, Invoke() stuff? Neat.
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COM
Friday, 10 July 2009
Ahhh, COM. Either it just works. Or it's a nightmare. This is where you really want good, informative exception info. COM interop is really a good place to get things right. I've wasted days working with bad COM components that didn't provide useful information when errors occurred.
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Chapter 12 - Now this is what I thought. Almost.
Friday, 10 July 2009
After swimming around in murky waters for the first half of the book, now I feel a little more comfortable. Hello authentication, authorization, IIdentity, GenericIdentity. But what's this sneaky PrincipalPermission thingo? Another winner! Declarative or imperative permissions that apply to users or roles. Now that's more secure than IsInRole(). Not in the role demanded by the permission? Ba-Bowww... SecurityException.
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