Blog Archive

2016

Happy old year

It is customary to wish people a happy new year, to take on new year’s resolutions, and generally to celebrate the upcoming unknown. Rather than do this, I’d...

VeST Redux – What’s so wrong with mocking frameworks?

While working on a project, on a nice summer day, and after many hours of frustration and disbelief at my incapacity to make sense of some test code using a ...

Architecture in code

When we build systems, we model the world around us: models, commands, events, resources, they’re all intellectual spectres of reality that help us reason. ...

Don't version your HTTP APIs

Infoq has released an article covering my talk on “Versioning is evil”, which is awesome. I’m preparing new content for the blog about the subject, and a new...

HTTP APIs’ Slack room is live!

HTTP APIs, from the RPC-style all the way to ReST, are difficult to discuss over twitter. Fear not, we now have a solution.

How to always be right on the Internets

Thanks to everyone that came to PubConf. In case you wonder how to always be right on the Internets by leveraging fallacies, the slides are now available on ...

Progressive.net

If anyone is wondering what to do later this month, we’re having an amazing line-up for progresive.net, June 22nd to 23rd.

Speaking updates

Having just finished a couple of contracts, I have a bit of time to refocus on finishing off this site a bit. That means I’m available for work by the way :)

Working around the lack of count in Terraform modules

Terraform modules do not currently support count, and so reusing a module a dynamic number of ways is impossible. To work around this, we can rely on a smal...

Passing empty arrays to resource arguments in Terraform

The interpolation syntax of terraform allows you to do many other things to make your modules reuseable, but one of the common problems we find is passing em...

Creating Terraform resources conditionally

Terraform has modules, and they are both insanely great and absolutely infuriating at times.

Ignoring files in git, but only locally

I love git for one main reason: there are enough advanced commands to make nearly any problem find a solution. Ignoring some files, but only in your reposito...

Cloud for .net – Windows Passwords, locks and keys

We created a box, and it’s with a nice security group that allows us to RDP in the machine.

Cloud for .net – RDP’ing into a Windows box

Now that we have a windows box, but we can’t do anything wish. If you tried to connect to RDP, you’d fail, because the ports are not open. We’re going to fix...

Cloud for .net – Infrastructure in source control

More and more clients are deploying their applications to the cloud. This presents many challenges for .net developers: Windows has had a poor story for remo...

Agile Anarchy – Remote working

Getting from and to work is stressful enough at the best of times. When you add terrible traffic, children, or people leaving very far, a good case can be ma...

Agile Anarchy – Wall un-building and the Panopticon

At this point in a project, you have achieved, through working on one thing at a time, the close-to-perfect close-to-one-piece flow. It makes absolutely no s...

Public Speaking – Mean Girls, Peer Pressure and Whiskey

After discussing privately with a couple of people, my last post in this serial may have been misunderstood, and I wanted to clarify what I meant about the “...

Agile Anarchy – Death to the open plan

Once you only create rules when their benefits outweight their cost, you can start re-imagining how you work with your team. Mobprogramming gave us a new br...

Agile Anarchy – Mobbing

It is rare these days that I see developers working alone. Pairing has broken into the mainstream, and yet it is rare to find a pair you’re comfortable pairi...

Agile Anarchy – Null Design

When agile practices are used just to be used, we’ve lost track of why processes and rules exist. Rules come with costs, and only when the benefits of having...

Agile Anarchy – Is Agile dead?

With a previous client, we started out in a traditional SCRUM environment. We had a wall with columns, estimations, there was some SCRUMs of SCRUMs, we had b...

VeST Redux – Semantic persistence

In a VeST system, we always implement at least two persistence mechanisms: the simulator and the main, one in-memory and one going to the real system, and th...

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – CV

One of the most difficult times in the life of a contractor is having to prepare his CV, linked.in profile and all the other things that you need to do to ho...

VeST Redux – Testing strategy for aggregates in DDD

A main part of VeST is the belief that, while unit testing at the class level can be useful, testing at the scenario level provides the same benefits with le...

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – Talks

I’ve been recovering from man-flu, and today is the first day where my brain has cleared enough to start coding again.

Agile Anarchy – An introduction

One of the reasons I have been silent a lot in 2014 and 2015 is that I had the privilege of working with an amazing team. We created a completely new way of ...

VeST Redux – Test rigs and external APIs

In my previous post, we touched on the concept of test rigs, reusable tests that can be ran against many implementations. When using VeST for your systems, y...

VeST Redux – Components, mains, simulators and test rigs

My introduction post, from way back when, focused on the idea that testing each class independently in the conventional TDD way had significant costs, and th...

Agile furniture building

After the sudden loss of a friend to cancer, I took some time off posting on here. I’m back, so you shall have your daily dose of Seb again from Monday.

Public Speaking – Vici

Now that you’ve conquered the stage, you have the jokes ready, and you’re comfortable with the speaking experience, it’s time to look at the world of confere...

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – Comments

With all my prose migrated, it was only fair to try and migrate yours!

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – Serials

You may have noticed a list of other blog entries in this serial just above (provided I don’t update the design again).

macOS for the .net guy – Learning the Shell

I’ve been lazy. I switched to a mac a long long time ago, and my dream since then has been to finally stop using windows altogether.

Now you 403 see it, now you 404 don‘t

The next blog post in the “Public Speaking” serial is being written, but I’ll probably hold off from publishing it for a few days.

Public Speaking – Vidi

I got into speaking because I kept trying, in no small part thanks to the many user groups that litter our country with safe and fun environments to push our...

Public Speaking – Veni

We’ve had a lot of various blog posts recently on speaking in public, and Todd’s post got me thinking about the posts I’ve had in my drafts for a few days. I...

Don‘t run with Feature Toggles in your hands

Feature toggles have been on my radar for a while, thanks to Martin Fowler’s introduction from back when, where he argues for enabling or disabling certain f...

VeST Redux – Specification-driven development

Building software is easy. Really, it’s just a matter of writing a bunch of statements that do something, and voilà, you have a running program. Building the...

Dark Matter The False Dichotomy

A twitter conversation is as good a reason for a blog post. One of the very interesting conversations we’ve had recently has been around reach.

VeST Redux – The Tenets of Vertical Slice Technologies

Once upon a time, I blogged about my homegrown approach to designing systems using VeST.

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – Master templates

GitHub Pages uses Jekyll, which then uses liquid as it’s templating mechanism.

.net core is getting easier to sell

The latest community stand up from the asp.net team just announced a big rename.

The Mythical 17:00 Split

For PubConf, I created an ignite-style talk describing something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but only recently managed to formalise.

Blogging once a day

My good friend Mark Rendle mentioned at NDC London that he had as a new year resolution to blog once a day, and that it lasted 3 days. As it happens, I gave ...

The mythical 17:00 split

Here is the new talk I just made at #pubconf organised fantastically by amazing people. If you were not there you missed something rather amazing.

Versions Are Evil

Thanks to all that came to my short session on versioning. The slides have now been published, see below.

What's good feedback from a talk?

As happens often when hanging out with speakers, the discussions started gravitating towards the ever fundamental question of talk feedback.

They put speakers on a leaderboard. You won't believe what happened next!

NDC is an amazing conference, one of the best you can attend. I’m very privileged and excited to be speaking there.

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – Importing content

I have to admit to being a bit of a digital hoarder. I keep digital copies of everything, and I have bits of code, svn repos and backups all the way to 2001....

On to London we go

I’m very excited to be on the rota officially for NDC London, where I’ll be presenting my Versions are evil talk, on Friday at 11:40.

Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – A new design

SerialSeb.com has existed for a very long time, but has received very little love. As the saying goes, “shoemaker’s wives go barefoot and doctor’s wives die ...

Another move

As we say goodbye to 2015, a year my blog has had no updates at all, for reasons I may share with you one day, I’m thrilled with this new development.

2014

Making a BT Business Hub 3 let an Airport Extreme run the show

This entry will be very localised to the British isles (see what I did there?).

OpenRasta: Today and tomorrow

The OpenRasta community has experienced a bit of a renaissance. And so it should, for there is much to rejoice about, and really cool stuff happening in the ...

Rest On Hanselminutes

Last week I finally managed to catch up with Scott for a little podcast talking about Practical ReST, the course and a few other bits and pieces.

Kickstarter A Day In

It was only yesterday that I announced the start of the kickstarter project on twitter.

2013

Unit testing is out, Vertical Slice Testing is in

We have been doing testing for a long time. Some people are practicing TDD, but I think that’s only 46 people in the world and they all follow my twitter fee...

Relaunching SerialSeb - Practical ReST and then some

Well. After 5 months of soul-searching, ups and downs, I’m back, more focused than ever (think laser beam focus). This week has seen the launch of several im...

Bringing ReST to Warsaw

I’m happy to announce that we are planning a Warsaw class towards the end of May / beginning of June. For more information and to book, contact us now.

London Class May 2013

A great and rare opportunity to attend the class at a reduced price, only £999 for 3 days of intensive ReST design!

Will Seb shave his head?

Well, it has been quite a few months since I’ve blogged. There are many reasons why, and I may or may not break the hiatus in 2013, you’ll have to wait to fi...

2012

Microsoft and Open Source

I have been a vocal, and sometimes harsh, critic of Microsoft’s approach to Open Source Software. I call that activism, some call it whining, ranting or piss...

Http Caching is complicated for everyone

As you may know, one of the talks I’m giving this year is HTTP caching 101.

The new OpenEverything organization

OpenRasta has been there for many years, and is the most widely used alternative framework for ReST applications.

HTTP tour: Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen.

I’ll be touring the north of Britain from the 18th of January with two talks: HTTP caching 101 and Links, forms and Unicorns.

2011

Free OpenWrap workshop Saturday 10th December in Lier, Belgium

You get 4 hours and a lunch (complimentary from PeopleWare) to come and talk about package management and how it can change the way you build software. It’s ...

#oredev ReST talk - Links, forms and Unicorns

Here are the slides for the talk I just delivered at Oredev. If you like secret agents, assassination attempts and ReST, those are for you.

OpenWrap 2.0.1 – a better way to look at dependencies

There are many many features in OpenWrap 2.0, and at this rate it will take me many weeks before we go through them all. As such, I shall only blog about the...

Free OpenWrap workshop, Cambridge, 5th of November

If you want to know what package management is, how it can help you and how you can use the latest OpenWrap version to solve your dependency needs, I’m givin...

OpenWrap 1.0.2 available

I’ve just pushed a new version of the 1.0 OpenWrap package.

OpenWrap 2.0–Package locking

Well, this one was scheduled for much later in the development process of OpenWrap, but ended up being built last week.

Developing multiple packages in one go

Very often, it is the case that you are working on multiple packages at the same time. Keeping dependencies up-to-date in those scenarios can be a very tedio...

Extending configuration in OpenRasta 2.1

[Updated to clarify what the configuration meta-model actually is.]

Trying out OpenWrap 2.0

[Update 3: github is not pushing the changes to openwrap.org properly, I’ve updated the link to the shell in the post to point to the correct file.]

Summer holidays are over, time for a new roadmap

As many of you many have noticed, things have stalled a bit over the summer on the master branches of openrasta and openwrap. While our amazing contributors ...

One step closer still

One of the things that OpenWrap 2.0 will feature is dynamic loading and unloading of “solution plugins”, components that load up when you start working on a ...

My colour scheme

People have asked before, after giving presentations, to share my theme. Yes, I commit the cardinal crime of refusing presenting on a white background, it hu...

What’s new in OpenWrap 2.0?

[Update: I’ve bumped the version number to 2.0. After discussing on twitter with people, it seems much more in spirit with semver.org and the vast amount of ...

One step closer to a release…

Next GayGeekDinner this Friday

After all the lovely royalty events of the last weekend, it’s our turn to queen it out. Come and join us for the next GayGeekDinner this Friday.

OpenWrap 1.1 – The Shell

OpenWrap 1.1 is around the corner, and has a lot of new features and improvements that I’ll be blogging about as they land.

Opening a solution from the command line in PowerShell

As you probably have realized by now, I love the command line. It’s the most productive tool we can have. And as I’ve not blogged very much lately, with me b...

I have moved

I don’t really post on this blog anymore, I’m keeping it for announcements about OpenSpaceBeers, GayGeekDinners and other less global matters. The new blog h...

QCon, OpenRasta, OpenWrap and OpenSpaceBeers (and that’s enough OpenXxx things for now)

A great conference is nearly upon us, QCon London has opened its doors today for the first of two days of workshops. As it happens, I am presenting on OpenRa...

Minting new Internet Media Type Identifiers

A lot of conversations have been had at #restunconf about minting a new media type, when you should do it and how. I’ll try to blog about it in the closer fu...

Coming up next in OpenWrap…

Strong-naming assemblies and OpenWrap

One of the design principles of OpenWrap is not only to be a glorified Add Reference dialog, but to provide a better way of dealing with dependencies, both a...

2010

NuGet feed has changed again, and broken OpenWrap again.

Just a quick note that the NuGet feed has had some more changes that have broken OpenWrap once more. As usual, this wasn’t quite documented anywhere nor did ...

Why choosing your own path for packages is asking the wrong question

I’ve had a couple of people asking me if we could change where packages get stored from the /wrap folder to their own folder. I’m not the only one with that ...

An update to nuget support in OpenWrap

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, as we’ve been working very hard at the new package resolver infrastructure I’ll blog about soon.

Presenting the OpenWrap logo…

Building packages with OpenWrap

So, I was reading this entry about how to build packages for NuPack. That is something people need to know about for OpenWrap too, so this is the documentati...

Creating a new project with OpenWrap

With all this discussion of OpenWrap stuff, we’ve not covered yet how easy it is to create a new project in OpenWrap and get it off the ground.

Announcing OpenSpaceBeers, the open-space for all developers, whatever the platform

We’ve been running open-spaces for a while. It’s now time to build something new, and something that will hopefully benefit all communities. OpenSpaceBeers ...

Contributing to OpenWrap

I’ve already detailed how to fork OpenWrap to your github account. Now you want to make some changes. Here’s a small guide of the main things you need to do,...

Using the command help subsystem in OpenWrap

Documentation in a command-line tool is important. My latest push (as of a few minutes ago) implements a much improved get-help command. This should let you ...

Creating your own OpenWrap repository on a file-share

I’m feeling in a blogging mood. There are so many things that are cool in OpenWrap that you can expect quite a bit of content in the next few days.

Using NuPack as a package repository in OpenWrap

NuPack came out a short while ago. While NuPack is only a subset of what OpenWrap was built to solve, a lot of libraries have already been added to their rep...

Installing OpenWrap from the sources

OpenWrap normally relies on a central server for providing the initial shell and its associated packages. However, when you get on a new machine, you don’t n...

Building polyglot packages for OpenWrap and NuPack

As we approach a first full-featured OpenWrap release, it’s time to provide package builders some guidance in how to build good packages.

o create-blog -name “Hello World”

I have had a blog for a long time, and I’ll continue maintaining it for all the social events I organize in London. But When I was offered the chance to join...

Seb does Australia

I've been wanting to do it for a long while, and now seems like the right time to be planning.

OpenWrap late changes and release date

I’ve delayed slightly the tutorial on Part 2, as ready or not, I’m pushing binaries and the server online on the 26th of August. Call it a first preview. Del...

OpenWrap’s view on versioning

There has been a bunch of questions regarding the differences between CoApp and OpenWrap when it comes to versioning. If you follow the blogs and that projec...

Adding OpenWrap to an existing project (Part 1)

I’m continuing writing up teaser posts on how to use OpenWrap. Building a new office has taken away my Sunday, so the server is still not up, and the code un...

The initial OpenWrap installation

Going down OpenWrap’s rabbit hole, the first thing you do is retrieve a fresh copy of o.exe, the Command shell. At a whopping 32k (for the debug build), you ...

The future of OpenRasta

You may have noticed that development on OpenRasta has slowed down quite a bit recently. It’s a double-edge sword: the codebase is stable enough for most peo...

ReSharper 5 incompatible with OpenRasta...

Let's do a social engineering experiment. You see, ReSharper has been ignoring pageParserFilter code in asp.net (the thing asp.net MVC and OpenRasta use to e...

An intro to what OpenWrap is

I vowed not to come out too early with loud propaganda on what OpenWrap is, but many have told me that they want to see it happen now rather than together wi...

Why I haven’t blogged about OpenWrap yet.

Because it’s not ready and I haven’t announced it yet. I showed the state of the code-base at the progressive.net workshop, to gather feedback from smart pe...

Chuck Norris doesn’t follow people, he is the follow process

OpenRasta needs an msdn license

I don’t usually use this blog for requesting help, but I’m afraid on this one I have to. I don’t have access to an MSDN license anymore, as the cost is too ...

OpenSource on .net at Microsoft TechDays

Register now at http://techdays-oss.eventbrite.com/ The .net ecosystem is rich in open-source solutions that many have already adopted as part of their busi...

Announcing the “20 days to OpenRasta” project

As some of you already know, I’m very excited that OpenRasta is being presented at Mix10 in Vegas by none other than the talented Kyle Baley. As I’ve not rea...

2009

OpenRasta 2.0 release party!

The time is upon us, for a release and for a party to celebrate it. Come and join all the UK OpenRasta users, it’s on the 12th of December and in Central Lo...

Derivative work for speakers, or a guide on how to use my content

I realize I’ve never clarified what you can or cannot do with my slides and my talks. So here’s a clarification for anyone that wishes to inspire themselves ...

Announcing the first Cambridge AltNetBeers – StackOverflow edition

We are expanding, how brilliant is that! If you want to have an open-space after the Cambridge StackOverflow dev-day, you now can!

#AltNetWorkshop on CQS with Greg Young

I’m very pleased to announced that this weekend, for a day only, Greg Young will be delivering a workshop for the AltNetGroup, for free, in London, on Comman...

AltNetBeers StackOverflow DevDays edition

The registration for the post-StackOverflow conference in London is now open at http://altnetbeers-stackoverflow.eventbrite.com/ I’m sure it’s going to be a...

London GayGeekDinner – Friday 9th of October

Just a quick reminder for those not monitoring the www.gaygeekdinner.com site, our next event is this Friday, and you can register at http://london-gaygeekdi...

Announcing a new kind of events: AltNetCrossTalks, this Friday at MRM!

And there you go. When you can’t scale up, scale out! We’re creating a new kind of talks, one where communities will meet and cross the technological Styx. ...

Last day to enter the raffle for a ticket to Roy Osherove’s TDD workshop

As you know, Roy is delivering the first of our AltNetWorkshops on Saturday the 26th of September. Most of the tickets are now gone, but you have the chance ...

The first AltNetWorkshop with Roy Osherove on Intro to TDD

I'm very glad to announce that we launched the AltNetGroup website last week, and opened the first couple of tickets to the first AltNetWorkshop, something t...

Alternative Network Group News – AltNetBeers #12

As the ever excellent Udi Dahan is in town, it’s only natural that I organize an AltNetBeers. So get ready for another session on the 16th of September! You ...

Seb does Ireland – 30th of September to 3rd of October

And because I’m equally excited about going back to Ireland as I am going back to Scotland, I’ll be doing a bunch of things there. Wednesday 30th September ...

Seb does Scotland – 23rd to 25th of September

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been a up north, and with such a great community up there, it was only a matter of time before I got back. Frankly, I was ...

NHibernate repository that Oren won’t like

public interface IRepository<T> : INHibernateQueryable<T>{ ITransaction BeginTransaction(); void Delete(T item); T Get(object id); ...

OpenRasta 2.0 beta 2 is out

Grab the binaries at http://www.ohloh.net/p/openrasta/download?package=OpenRasta+2.0&release=Beta+2 or the code at http://svn.caffeine-it.com/openrasta/b...

Presenting OpenRasta in Aarhus, Denmark, 27th of August

The good chaps in Denmark have asked me to do a session on OpenRasta. You can imagine how excited I was, and I immediately said yes! You can go and register ...

What a difference a framework can make…

Rick Strahl, C# MVP extraordinaire, has released a very cool app at codepaste.net. Go and check it out, it’s quite cool. One of the things Rick is doing is ...

NHibernate and OpenRasta frenzy in Aarhus, Denmark

On a very positive note, I’ll be delivering Skillsmatter’s NHibernate course in Aarhus, Denmark, from the 26th to the 28th of August. I’m also discussing w...

Open Source, NIH and the meaning of conversation

[Update: Nate was kind enough to link so we could enter a conversation] Yesterday, I made a certain comment on a person’s decision to release something in o...

Default parameter values in OpenRasta

So, MVC 2 is innovating by having default values on parameters. I think there’s a lot of value in doing that, and as such OpenRasta has always supported thos...

AltNetBeers #13 – StackOverflow edition

Just to let everyone know that we’ll be organizing the AltNetBeers on the evening after the StackOverflow London conference, on the 28th of October. The even...

Announcing the Alternative Network Group

As my servers are all down to maintenance, I use this blog entry to repeat the announcement that was made on friday night at AltNetBeers 10 regarding the Alt...

When agile goes bad, slides and pointers

I’ve given that talk quite a few times now, and always forget to give the full material. So here goes. The slides can be downloaded at http://svn.caffeine-i...

In how many ways can the Microsoft Ajax 4 syntax break XHTML?

[Update: Added example pages from aria] For the answer, see the points below. I was going to email the comments below to some people at Microsoft that have...

Fighting for ReST, or the tale of the ice-cream maker

I keep on reading things like the following quote from wikipedia’s talk page on the ReST article (a poorly written page at that): Decide on an unambiguou...

London AltNetBeers #9 – At the glass house

Same as usual, please register, limited space, it’s in Soho, it’s at 6:30, it’s about being a developer and talking about it, and it’s sponsored by ThoughtWo...

Formation nHibernate a Paris

Une fois n’est pas coutume, cette entrée sera en Français. Vous avez sans doute vu qu’ayende a donne une formation nHibernate à Londres. Vous pouvez mainten...

Looking for help on your project? I’m available.

I’m available for work from now, so if you’re looking for a freelance that can code, coach and teach, pop me an email.

Interfaces with static methods, reducing the cost of extensibility

Someone last week mentioned that Java was now getting static methods defined on interfaces. We’ve had that capacity, through extension methods, since C#3, an...

Bridging the gap between communities – ColdFusion and SOTR

Earlier this week, I attended the Scotch on the rocks conference. The organizers had the brilliant idea to invite developers from other communities with Amne...

Internal DSLs, method chaining and discoverability

Paul says “The whole .NET space has gone fluent interface crazy”, and he is quite right. Everybody has their own fluent interfaces, and unless I’m missing th...

Summer speaking schedule, AltNetBeers, the alt.net conference, oh my!

Wow, who would’ve thought the first conference season would’ve been so intense! I had an absolute blast meeting people, presenting, chatting away and drinkin...

How some agencies make it hard to trust them

I just received an email from Computer People, telling me “we agreed that I would keep in touch and update you with any further opportunities and development...

Yet another reason to love TestDriven.net

As I was coding some new tests for the container integration part of OpenRasta (which, since beta 2 changes, has become much more complicated…), I discovered...

My MVC Best Practices talk

I’ve given that talk in quite a few places, and always promise to post the slides on my blog. But in fact, I was secretly waiting for the VistaSquad video to...

London AltNetBeers #8 – 12th of May, Back to the pub

The next AltNetBeers is going to be on the 12th of May! Drinks and food will be provided by our two sponsors, SkillsMatter and ThoughtWorks, big thanks to t...

The AltNetBeers #8 is postponed until the second week of May

Because of the progressive.net workshops happening and the June event happing earlier in the month (and me not preparing early enough), I’m postponing the Ap...

Schedule of the AltNet London Beers and why I’m dropping the dot

We’ve now had quite a few very successful events with the alt.net London beers. One thing that strikes me every single time in this event is how much people ...

Announcing the first London GayGeekDinner

One of the most surprising thing for me has always been an impression by many LGBT geeks that they were alone, especially around the younger crowd out there....

WebDD 09 Registration is open

The WebDD community-driven conference registration is open, go ahead and book yourself for a day of fun and web technology! You can have a look at the sched...

Multiple views in OpenRasta, and delving into the pipeline

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com. I just had an idea to clean-up my resource definitions. I could’ve go...

alt.net London Beers #7

I’m not going to do yet another intro, the event detail is on http://ukdotnet.ning.com/events/altnet-london-beers-7 The place, same as usual, same people, T...

Continuing the discussion on Software Craftsmanship

Conversation has continued in the comments, and I think it's going in the right direction. But then Anthony takes offense to the fact that I call out to Jaso...

Why I’m not signing the Software Craftsmanship manifesto… Yet.

[Update: Jason has responded in the comments that he was not responsible for teaching or convincing me of the values of the software craftsmanship movement. ...

From gatekeepers to enablers

Every organization goes through a stage in its life where boundaries between teams start appearing: developers do the development, infrastructure handles the...

Progressive.net workshops. Register now, save hundreds.

Just a quick reminder. My some mistake of history, I’ve been asked to deliver workshops alongside Ayende, Scott Bellware, Hammet, Mike Hadlow, Ian Cooper, Da...

European VAN - OpenRasta

Last week, I got given the opportunity to present OpenRasta in the European Virtual Alt.Net meeting. It was a blast, thanks to Colin and Jan for organizing i...

Speaking Agenda

It’s been an exciting weekend. Thanks to a few prople with webcams, those of us that weren’t in Seattle have been able to follow some of the discussions at t...

Alt.net London Beers #6

We’re going back to the original schedule of last Tuesday of the month. Here’s the excerpt from the ning site (on which you should go and register right now ...

DDD voting is open!

There are now two DDD events you need to vote for. DDD Belfast has opened votes this morning http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/Users/Vot...

Update on the Two-Tier Service Application guidance

Following my recent analysis of the Two-Tier Service Application Guidance, the P&P group contacted me and others to ask if we’d be interested in giving a...

Agile and Scrum failure stories

Dear fans and readers, I’ve now started writing a talk entitled Top tips to ruin your agile process. It is my intent to run the audience through the worst t...

Apparently Glenn Block distributes malware.

[Update: What I thought was an individual funny incident was in fact for the whole internet. See the The Register article about the snafu.] We know that the...

We did warn you…

Received in my inbox today from an ex-colleague. This made me smile. Subject: ARGH THE FUCKIN ENTITY FRAMEWORK! Received: 29 January 2009 What a ...

How to fix Microsoft’s Two-Tier Service Application Scenario (REST)

Microsoft has released a beta version of a guidance talking about REST in 2-tier applications. I’ve had many rants about Microsoft’s attitude towards REST an...

Does history repeats itself?

I’ve been following Opera’s reactions to the EU antitrust regulations against Microsoft’s bundling IE in windows, which they have been calling for… Anyone r...

User Experience is not only about the nice logo…

Enough said me thinks.

Alt.net Beers #5 – 12th of January (yes, I know it’s next Monday…)

With all the festive excitements, I really thought I had announced this when I put the date down on http://ukdotnet.ning.com but I obviously didn’t. So as (...

Fluent-nhibernate and nvarchar(max)

As you may know, text and ntext types are being depreciated in sql server 2005+, and replaced by varchar(max) and nvarchar(max). If like me you rely on nhib...

Using extension methods on null objects

One feature that is often disregarded in extension methods is that they get called for null objects. While instrumenting parts of OpenRasta, I faced the prob...

OpenRasta status update

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com. Already a month since the last updates, and I’ve been churning quite ...

2008

Visual Studio 2008 has buggy windowing code introduced in SP1… And no hotfix planned!

Update: Microsoft has released a hotfix. Thanks! This issue keeps on coming up in my day to day work, and it takes me an hour or so everytime to fix… Whenev...

From talking to doing – Open Space Coding Day

We are having very interesting debates and conversations at every single alt.net event that has been organized. Talking with others is a great way to reach a...

OpenRasta is available

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com. Don’t get too excited, I’m still quite far from beta 1… But here goes...

Blog design updated

For those of you only reading from an RSS reader, have a look at the website when you got time. I’ve updated the logo. Gives some well-deserved character to ...

OpenRasta status update

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com. I’ll be adding the proper headers tomorrow and release this version. ...

And you wonder why I haven’t got my next contract yet…

Received yesterday. A key aspect of the job would be your ability with using multiple SQL server data-sources within one application, calling from one or...

Alt.net London Beers Proceedings available

http://www.altnetpedia.com/AltNetBeers.ashx

OpenRasta finally gets its yellow screen of death.

The infrastructure to generate the page presented when an error occurs has been in place for a while, but lack of time and a bunch of bugs were preventing...

Blend 3 will use the Visual Studio 2010 C# editor

I could be wrong. But I could be right. Announced at the next Mix?

A birthday and looking back on my digital life

So it’s my birthday today. Every year until this now, my birthday has be the time for doing absolutely nothing. As I geared-up my community involvement this ...

One more day at a conference…

And one more night of discussion, passion and learning. I get so much from meeting the people that attend conferences that I really think that not attending ...

Beginning of #TechEd – Early Bird WTF.

Thought I’d moan a bit more about the organization… By registering early, you get given, I quote the guide, ”a reserved seat” at the keynote. When you check...

#TechEd – Keynote

[Update: Indeed, the unannounced stuff was the sharepoint visual studio integration. Paul Andrew just blogged about it. Introduction from the business guy. ...

On my way to Barcelona….

[pre-nagging: this post contains jokes about Italians, British, Spanish and French people. If you’re offended by generalization about nationalities on holida...

Apologies for the silence… Out of work and conferences

Sorry to all people reading (and not taken over by tweeter fever). Between PDC and KaizenConf, I took a couple of days off and am now getting ready to meet e...

KaizenConf , so far, has been about…

Self-improvement Corporate adoption of lean Talking about how learning how to be a good developer and a good chefs are one and the same thing Tal...

I am a ToolWindow

For anyone that attended Glenn’s talk.

Alt.net OpenConf session at PDC!

For all of you alt.netters and interested parties, I just came back from the OpenConf style area next to the exhibit floor, and there’s an alt.net track bein...

Alt.net London Beers #4 – 25th of November

If you plan to attend, please leave a comment on this entry. I should have the time in the next few days to publish the result of the third edition of the ...

PDC tomorrow, WeHo tonight

Anyone wanting to come for dinner / drinks in WeHo (gaying PDC up a bit), or meet from tomorrow, phone number is +44 7789 00 8282 :)

Being in a printed program again

I just got confirmation that you voted for one of my sessions for DDD. I’m thrilled! It’s going to be an absolute pain to write the material needed to get wh...

While I’m in a ranting mood…

Seen in the wild.         /// <summary>         /// This is only for Unit ...

Multiplying project files…

I was going to have yet another rant on separating everything in a ridiculous amount of project files, to ensure separation, and started venting to one of my...

HttpResponse.Flush forces Chunked transfer…

That one took me quite a while to understand. I’ve been building the integration tests for OpenRasta, a bunch of classes that configure a full web-server and...

Once upon a time, code I wrote…

  After installing Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta, I noticed that it automatically indexed files shared on my big tera-server. And below is a nugget fr...

Track me down!

Added to the site, the calendar of which events I’m attending. That way, anyone wanting to give me a million pound, or punch me in the face, and everything i...

OpenRasta status update

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com. A couple of people have access to the code and have been kind enough...

Porting the Suteki Shop to OpenRasta

Mike Hadlow has just announced the commercial release of Jump the Gun, an online shop based on his Suteki Shop cms. Mike is an extremely bright guy that I’ve...

Building a new server at RapidSwitch

I’ve been on the lookout for a windows server 2008 server for quite a while, and have now selected one. The thing that surprised me in my search has been the...

The content of the presentation at VBUG Brighton tonight

As last time I got completely overloaded with work and forgot to post the content of the demo, this time I’m doing it the other way around. Code is available...

Alt.net London Beers #3 – 14th October 2008

Following on the success of the previous events,I am happy to announce the next alt.net London Beers event. The format is going to be different from the pre...

Developing .net code since 2000?

Over the years, I’ve had a couple of people in interviews being surprised at my assertion that I started development on .net in 2000. As I go through yet ano...

Kaizenconf is open

For those that were waiting for the kaizenconf registration to be open, it now is. But it’s not really a registration, it’s a request for a registration. So ...

Work availability

If you’re looking for help with your project and need a consultant, I’m available for the first two weeks of October. And if you’re looking for a developer /...

Vote now for DDD!

Quite many very interesting session proposed for the next DDD. Go and vote now for your favorite sessions (and if you don’t like any, you can always vote fo...

The case of global.asax not being executed in IIS7

Global.asax is used in both asp.net MVC and OpenRasta for implementing your configuration. In Rasta 1.x, the handling of request was done through a catchall ...

Microsoft, for Christmas I’d like…

A Visual Studio SP1 ++ that fixes all the bugs you’ve recently introduced A web designer that passes the ACID2 test A browser that impleme...

The rubber duck in agile teams

Saw this from twitter and it made me smile: http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2008/08/scrum-bestiary-the-rubber-duck/ Have you had a rubber duck to deal w...

Proposing a syntax to attach behaviors to html elements

ScriptSharp, like asp.net AJAX, has the notion of behaviors, javascript code that can attach itself to DOM elements and change their, well, behavior. As par...

When a provider ditch its own product…

I’m currently researching Server 2008 VPS products available, and stumbled upon bytehouse’s offering: Why use a Windows operating system? ...

Come and listen (or talk) about asp.net MVC in Brighton!

VBug apparently didn’t learn their lessons from the last presentations and asked me to come back to deliver my Bingo asp.net MVC talk in Brighton, the day be...

Using getElementsBySelector in ScriptSharp

I’m on my way to my second spike for one of my clients on playing with ScriptSharp to extend Rasta with Ajax functionality, and really wanted to be able to s...

Received this morning

Dear Sebastien We are currently searching for a JOB TITLE to work in  CITY, COUNTRY  for DURATION plus extensions. This is a fantastic contra...

“It doesn’t work”

Something seriously cracks me up. I hear day after day people telling me one technology or another, one tool or another, fails in matching their ...

Updating Hyper-V to RTM

As is usually the case when you’re under pressure to push a new release of an app for a client, something goes horribly wrong. What went wrong tonight is si...

The testing anti-pattern

I've now finished my previous gig and the guys are busy chasing some recurring issues with the application. Because of its complex architecture, those issues...

asp.net MVC presentation - the results are in!

The nice people at VBUG just sent me the result of the evaluation forms, and I am very pleased with the result, as a vast majority seems to have enjoyed the ...

asp.net MVC presentation

What an absolutely crazy week! I've been working flat-out all week and still have a mountain of TODO: all over my screen. Thanks to everyone that came to th...

Alt.net UK Conference

Register now! http://altdotnet.org/events/5

Rewriting history?

I very often update and modify my posts until I feel they carry the meaning I intended. With English being a foreign language to me, there are many instances...

Linq-to-Entities and me: Does what it says on the tin

For those not reading on the web, the subtitle of my blog is the result of a lovely name-calling session by an anon on this site. Proof that it works, anothe...

The Entity Framework - don't get fooled in what is wrong about it

[edit: modified text slightly to more accurately reflect my point and remove references to Julia being fooled, which apparently has been interpreted as Julia...

Jesus is back and His name is... svn?!?

Picture worth a thousand bibles.

Linq2sql running on Sql Compact Edition - calling on VistaDb to clean-up their act

There is a lot of misunderstanding on this subject. Even competitors of Microsoft seem to not understand fully what Linq2sql is made of or what it actually c...

The Entity Framework paves the way to years of uneducating the masses

This is in substance the bitter taste that's left in my mouth as EF v1 gets ready to be released.. I've been debating on this topic in user groups, meetings ...

A real 3d-enabled web browser for WPF?

I know, some of you think that the browser control in the latest WPF 3.5 SP1 is the dog's bollocks. Sadly, it suffers from its origin as a wrapper around goo...

Alt.net London Beers #2 - 17th of June 2008

It's this time of the month again, and we continue with the tradition of organizing alt.net beers events monthly. As usual, it's casual, it's about chit cha...

NxtGenUG PreFEST08 Dinner & Fest08

NxtGenUG is the most thriving user group community around. They're organizing a dinner tonight, so come and join if you're around Reading (only 29 minutes on...

Hello twitter?

Craig has been selling me twitter over the last few months and I always kept it on the back of my mind. From this morning twitteroo is installed and I'll be ...

Agile smell

Anthony talks about a potential agile smell and the concept of self-organizing teams. As with his brother's blog, I still can't figure out how to post a comm...

Pdc2008 here I come

One of the first thing I did this morning was to make sure I had registered for the 2008 edition of the Pdc. Any brits travelling to LA or any alt.net guys ...

Retrospective on my asp.net MVC talk

I'm publishing this a bit late, but I took a few days (a whole two of them) without working. How refreshing! In an effort for a more transparent process, he...

Presenting at the London .net User Group: Put your webforms to REST - how to build rest-y architectures with .net

What: With the raise of the web 2.0 meme, more and more web applications claim to support REST architectures. We'll explore together what is REST and wha...

Reflecting on my last project

Today is a day off, as I've accumulated 36 hours of work between Monday and Tuesday and needed some rest. The last project I've been working on has been one ...

alt.net drinks moved, only slightly

Got a message from Catriona, and the original location for our alt.net beers event was fully booked, so it's now around the corner from the previous location...

Implementing INotifyPropertyChanged with DynamicProxy2

22:30 and still working on various bits and bobs, so I thought I'd take a well deserved break to tell you about one nice way to implement INotifyPropertyChan...

Thought of the evening

MSBuild + SqlCompare + DataContext == FluidDatabaseDesign

The tale of the 6.4 Megapixel desktop

Just upgraded my development environment, here's the picture. The laptop looks tiny next to the screen, but it is in fact a high res MacBook Pro, 1920x12...

IIS and asp.net URL validation weirdness and links

In my Migrating to IIS7 post, I highlighted that building REST frameworks that do meaningful things with Urls is hard on microsoft's platforms. I encourage ...

Alt.net London Beers #1

[Update: new location, see below] Here's the latest development. The alt.net London Beers event is being moved! Skills Matter is organizing a talk by Gojko...

Using Rasta #2 - Rasta in it's simplest form

Lack of time and sleep pushes me to be very lazy and present only the most trivial example of what Rasta was built for. Hopefully the future editions will be...

Migrating to IIS7

Over the last couple of weeks I've been upgrading my Rasta framework to support IIS7. Here's the highlights: I automatically detect the base Url address ...

Talking about Linq2Sql and Expression Trees tonight

If you're in London, why not join us tonight to celebrate Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5 releases at the London .net user group? We'll be discussing some of...

Announcing the Alt.net London Beers event

[Update: The event has been moved. See the latest location and stuff here] Many people are keen on continuing the discussion that was started by the alt.net...

Using Rasta #1 - An introduction

Rasta has many meanings, but for the purpose of this blog, it is the REST Architecture Solution Targeting Asp.net. I've written this framework for one of my ...

An extension method, just because I can.

Going to the dentist is an awkward experience. You know you have to use their service or your teeth will rot, but the experience is just not enjoyable. That...

Computer naming scheme

While looking around for nice visual studio color schemes, I stumbled upon Commonality's Naming your computers post. I'm happy to know I'm not the only one d...

Changing my blog subtitle

You know you're starting to be read too much when people get passionate about name-calling you. I'm very proud it is now happening to me, as Anonymous has pr...

referrals from internal wikis

Just found some referrals from wikis used internally at a previous client, full with the reference of the page, project code-name, etc. I wonder if anyone r...

IoC - The container is not a carpet, it's the floor

[Update: Removed references to the company, because while I may rightfully be bitter, it is irrelevant to the content of this post, and I don't want the two ...

Managing managers, another point of view

EricGu just posted about the role of a project manager in an agile environment. the person who takes that role needs to be mindful of that and willing to...

What's next with cloud storage?

FolderShare and SkyDrive come from the same team (the original guys that were bought by microsoft). SkyDrive has support for feeds. The Microsoft Sync frame...

HttpUtility.UrlEncode considered harmful

An interesting issue was recently raised against my rest framework. The following URI template was used to access a fictional customer: /customer/{customerN...

Foldershare isn't dead after all

Seen this morning: The Windows Experience Blog : Announcing Windows Live FolderShare Beta Refresh for PC-to-PC Sync That team, bought by Microsoft, has&#...

Deloitte employee rude on a train

[Update: oh well, this was unnecessary. I'd rather people understood the meaning of quiet zone and weren't so up their own a*se. And personal recorders are s...

Live.com dead?

Is it just me? [Update 18:08: it's back!]

The MVP presentation code

Last night, I've made some progress towards my long-overdue MVP series of articles, by rewriting what I had to adopt the same format as the presentation I di...

MacBook Air and Windows Vista x64

For the masochists amongst you, two tips when installing Vista 64bits on a MacBook Air: The mouse drivers don't work initially. Just rollback to the micr...

PowerShell one-liners for svn

A bit of CLI love (and I'm sure my readers will correct me fairly quickly with something much smaller and better!), for those like me that wish they never ha...

A life-saver for one-button developers

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jean-paul_boodhoo/archive/2008/02/12/another-handy-shortcut-combination-shift-f10.aspx I got used to use the menu system with th...

Follow-up on the OnXxx anti-pattern

[Started updating the previous entry, but the reply is chunky enough to go in its own post] One person on the dotnet-clr mailing list has highlighted, quite...

Making the case against OnXxx

[Updated the code sample for the raising event method. See my response to the comments that were made.] Some people, like Jeremy, really don't like events. ...

alt.net - Some comments and ideas

[Updated: Toned down a few sentences as they were more emotional than necessary.] I've been holding back from commenting as there's been a lot happening and...

alt.net Conference day 1

My hotmail is back apparently... we'll never know what happened. At the alt.net conference this morning... Early start after a very late evening. There are d...

Apparently I'm a spammer - Hotmail closes my account!

[Update: Hotmail reactivated the account within 24 hours. I do like a bit of drama...] My hotmail account has been suspended... If you've tried to reach me ...

Comparing serializations, or why Flash Remoting is not as efficient as some would imply

[Updated: Added reference to which classes were being used. The DataContractJsonSerializer is part of the .net 3.5 release.] There's been a few discussions ...

PowerShell: Opening explorer in the current directory

[Update again] As a reminder that my readers are usually much more skilled than I am, two anonymous commenter points out the obvious: ii . or ii $pwd...

Software that sucks #2: How to not write a patch

Most of you have probably already tried using the source server support in vs2008 for the .net framework code ScottGu announced (it was, after all, 8 days ag...

The latest in the family...

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/ Ordered. Because I need an ultra lightweight to test the battery life and solid state drive implications for Windows develo...

2007

An article on writing templated WPF custom controls

This is something that we had to discover with reflector when I wrote the Excel-like control we used for the National Express WPF application, so it's good t...

Merry Christmas

While some would consider Christmas as a catholic feast, I'll consider myself the Santa Claus, Christmas tree, tinsels, balls, presents and big dinners as ha...

XamlPadX V3.0

Lester just announced (well, on Wednesday but I have a big backlog because I spend my time reading the alt.net chat) XamlPadX 3.0. I know we didn't use the t...

As a follow-up on the mocking issue

Over there on CodeBetter.com, David Hayden has posted something about Model-View-Presenter that is a typical example of the confusion I was talking about in ...

Why Mock frameworks rock

Ayende just commented on my post about writing delegate-based test doubles. He  rightfully highlights that through the method I've described, it becomes...

Why Mock frameworks suck, and how to write delegate-based test doubles

There is a big rift in test-oriented developers about when or how to use mocks, what the difference between a mock, a stub, a fake and a dummy is, and what m...

IE8 is coming?

Off to bed. But before going, a question... Are we going to see IE8 being announced soon?

While on the subject of MacBook Pro

If your DVI output resolution is limited, Apple has finally released a new nvidia driver. You can find it here: Boot Camp 2.0: Video issues with Windows Vis...

How to wipe Mac OS out of your MacBook

What an eventful week. As I sit here waiting for countless installs on my VM to get MCMS up and running, I thought I'd take the time to blog about my beloved...

Managing managers follow-up

I just wanted to point people to Joel's Evidence Based Scheduling. A lot of people often misinterpret my rant about estimates being an impossible dark art as...

WPF ClearType and the case of the blurry font

While at TechEd I had lunch with IanG and the discussion around the blurry text in WPF came around. I mentionned that this was due to sub-pixel positioning: ...

Managing managers

I've worked on many projects in my career, and just like my style of development has changed, so have my managers. This is not a tutorial on how to manage yo...

TechEd: Reflection, code generation etc.

I'm sitting in Roy Osherove's session on lightweight code generation. Roy is a formidable speaker, but there's probably a bit too much content and some areas...

TechEd will be over very soon...

I'm not taking the plane until tomorrow, but it's very sad to see everyone starting to leave. The exhibition center is closed. Only one talk remain where I'l...

TechEd: SeaDragon and PhotoSynth

This is a private session I ended up going to because of my craving for orange juice.. PhotoSynth is in Silverlight, but it's not clear which version it will...

TechEd: The irresistible Forces and the Moveable Objects

Pat is a fantastic speaker, as always. However as always, the content can be followed by slides as well as by listening. For some reason, all the rules about...

TechEd: What's new in PowerShell V2

[EDIT: I'm thrilled by this presentation, can't wait to see the new bits!] Jeffrey P. Snover [EDIT: Posted on this on his blog] Before we start talking about...

No more content for today...

Sadly I've not found conference rooms with power plugs, so no more content for today. I'll probably do a quick update tonight of what was said but it may be ...

TechEd: Networking in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008t

.Why do we need to discuss the new network stack? We want faster applications, we want to connect to anyone else, and we want a simpler, direct model without...

TechEd: Threat Modeling

As an industry, we're good at looking at code compared to looking at security. You can run all the tools you want, you'll find security bug but you won't unc...

Skipping the first session

Even though I went to bed early, still woke up exhausted, so I'll give a miss to the first session. Such a beautiful day, it's a crime to not have some of th...

TechEd reactions

Here's a few things that went under my radar in the blogosphere about teched: Gill gives an overview of his first day, and think Barcelona is dirty at first...

TechEd: Security Development Lifecycle: Development Practices

[EDIT: By Michael Howard, definitely a legend in my book!] Until 8 years ago, i was completely focused on security features. But a small group of us, around ...

TechEd: Metropolis - Interchangeability of Operations

[EDIT: Unbelievable but you have to sneak in the conference rooms to get access to the one power point that's hidden under traps. Hopefully no one will ask m...

Even on Keynotes people don't set their fonts properly

I know it's not the aim to get Visual Studio or Blend visible, but for heaven's sake, LET ME SEE WHAT YOU DO and increase your font size. Silly! Technorati T...

TechEd - Keynote

Just arrived in the room for the keynote. Of course as it usually happens, all the devices I carefully put on charge last night were not charged, which inclu...

Arrived in Barcelona - The goods

Got in Barcelona alright. Had a goo time so far. Big bag of good with yet another unwearable t-shirt. Am I the only skinny person attending these conferences...

Getting ready for TechEd

Configuration of Windows Home Server for remote access - checked Full backup of the laptop on DVD - checked Spare external hard drive - checked Internationa...

Working with Sql user instances

Just a quick note, as I've not been very active on this blog for the last few weeks. I still have a lot of content in the pipeline so expect a new tips'n'tri...

Microsoft and the Magic sweet spot

As I was coding away on the train today, for a few minutes my mind blanked while watching the landscapes Virgin offer to us regular travelers. The did an ama...

The tale of the annoying read-only ConfigurationElement

One of the piece of code I disseminate on each project I work on is a lightweight factory builder. The idea is that you declare which interfaces are implemen...

WPF Tips'n'Tricks #8: Use your code-behind for binding

In the View-ViewModel-DataModel pattern that has been documented a fair bit for WPF, it is often the case that you want to have a testable class that wraps y...

.net source code to be released

From ScottGu, the source code for the .net framework libraries is going to be released, and on a source code server. This is thrilling news. Makes me regret ...

Software that sucks #1: Why you should do your testing on the train

This is a new rant series where I moan and exhibit my frustration with using some software that has been designed or tested by monkeys. I'll try as much as I...

MediaElement and MediaPlayer, and the ocx control fairy tale

As some of you know I'm always monitoring the msdn forums. I usually only step in the conversation when no one else had or when it's a complex subject I know...

Office Outlook Connector for Windows Live Hotmail's new version doesn't work!

Well, I was forced to do an update this morning and of course I can no longer access my Windows Live Hotmail account from outlook! Windows Live team, with au...

Programming WPF 2nd edition

Just received this morning as part of my review of all the major WPF books, and what a shock. The first edition was quite short, the second is 800 pages! Hal...

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Smooth(er) scrolling

A common request with ListViews and other scrollable components is to have a smoother scrolling. By default, when a scrollable control contains items that co...

Multiple .config files

A good tip from Scott Hanselman. on how to manage multiple configuration files. I end up rewriting these pre-build batches every time I'm on a new proje...

Excel and Sql, or the joys of data massages

A problem we encounter too often is extracting data the business stores in an excel spreadsheet. The way some people deal with it is way too often ...

Executing Sql scripts from powershell

Realizing I still have 6 Tips'n'Tricks articles nearly ready to go to follow up on the series, but none of them are finished, I thought I'd give you another ...

Mix:UK 07: Sneak Peeks

Bamboo flute playing with the audience. Demo of 3D application showing someone's head captured with an MRI, followed by a foot, with bones and flesh being co...

Mix:UK 07: Cloud versus Client

Panel debate. [EDIT: You'll have to excuse me but too many names to write down.] Chairman: First question, for Danny that comes from Google that worked on Ge...

So far so good...

Lot of typing but its worth it. Hopefully people will find the content useful. Note that I mostly retranscript what's being said, so when I type I its n...

I am the culprit

Two softies blog about someone blogging like crazy at the back, that would be me! http://blogs.msdn.com/dthorpe/archive/2007/09/11/blogging-at-remix07-london...

Mix:UK 07: Building next generation web applications using Windows Live Services

Integrate different applications together. End users will go and download the messenger client and interact with the messenger service though that tool. Our ...

Mix:UK 07: Building Silverlight applications using .net Part 2

I wonder if I made the right decision to only blog the second part, we shall know very soon. Questions: Availability: The control toolkit for silverlight, w...

Lunch time open mic session

Spent too much time eating, think I may have missed the beginning. Expression Web and Dynamic web template: Showing designer support to create a template for...

Mix:UK 07: Building Rich Client Applications with Blend, WPF & Silverlight.

Presented by Jon Harris. May I start by noticing that all the laptops in the room are a MacBook Pro or another. And to answer the question of why I attend th...

My take on the keynote

Overall I'm feeling a tiny bit let down. The demos were cool, but nothing very new or very exciting, except of course for adventureworks and the free silverl...

Mix:UK 07: Keynote

As it happens my badge got lost and arrived late, so I missed the Conchango bits, so straight on with Windows Live Services. New code to be released tomorrow...

Mix:UK 07 - Schedule

It's late and I should be in bed for tomorrow, but I realized the conference center is a whopping ten minutes walk from my home sweet home, so I have a ...

Mix:UK 07 tomorrow

How thrilling! Hopefully I'll be able to blog about it. Wonder if I can get my camcorder with me... Technorati Tags: mix:uk

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Preventing ScrollViewer from handling the mouse wheel

In the category of the pot talking to the pan, I present you ScrollViewer. It's the main control to implement scrolling in your templates, but it's also the ...

Google adSense

After having adSense for months (and a total earning of $0.18), the ads are finally showing up something connected with my blog: DataGrid controls from Infr...

Programming WPF 2nd Edition is out

Well through Chris Sell's blog, http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=2122, the new edition is shipping. I liked the previous version, onl...

Funny comment of the day

While coding, found a snippet one of my predecessors left me: //  Media Player gets its // knickers in a twist. Thought it was hilarious!

Using Visual Studio 2008 and Scrum for Team System

If you're using Scrum for Team System and Visual Studio 2008, you may notice that when connecting to a newly created Scrum Team Project, the Work Items node ...

Xceed DataGrid for WPF v1.2

 We've used the WPF DataGrid successfully on the National Express project, and the guys at Xceed are very prompt to answer questions and very quick to f...

Some TFS links

Not the freshest of links but useful if you use TFS. TFS Bug Snapper v1.0 Released and www.scrumforteamsystem.com that provides similar functionality to...

Quick note for testers

A quick link to Anutthara's blog because it's an invaluable resource for any tester. I'll probably enforce reading it to any tester I have to work with.

Install windows components on a locked-down machine

More and more companies set their users as non admin, even with XP. The so-called locking down tries to protect the user and the network against anythin...

Mix:UK 07 - I'll be there!

Well, it's now official, I'll be at Mix:Uk 07! Hope to get chatting with many of you about all things WPF / Silverlight. So much cross-over and so many diffe...

DirectShow filters from MediaElement

I previously pointed to Jeremiah blog about his and Leslie's amazing win32 integration work. Little did I realize that the trick I read a while ago to build ...

On why you shouldn't really subclass through XAML

As I am reviewing some code at the moment, I have been looking for this blog entry from Rob for a while, and just found it again: Building a control which ho...

Documentation != Help, or why visual studio sucks

Visual Studio 2005 has the terrible habit of opening the full msdn library whenever you press F1, which in my case is mostly accidental. Not that I don't nee...

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Receive notifications for dependency properties

Receiving notifications for dependency property changes on an existing object is a very common scenario. The way to do it properly is not very obvious. So mu...

More new WPF 3.5 things

Neil passed me some of these URLs in my comments and i'm all too happy to republish them. http://blogs.msdn.com/wpf3d/archive/2007/07/30/what-s-new-in-wpf-3...

WPF / Control interop, the blended way...

More of a bookmark for later, but seems Leslie and Jeremiah are doing fancy stuff with win32 controls and getting rid of the Hwnd limitation. Well done! Edit...

A Bit of WPF love. No, Bits of it!

Tim Sneath posted an answer to the question I asked on friday (well, posted something that answered my question, probably without him being aware of it ...

So there *are* new things for WPF in 3.5

Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 has just been released, and with it an announcement of new features and bug fixes for WPF. And the best bit for me: Data binding a...

The future soon

After a nice time at AKQA, I'm off in a week time to a big media company for some super duper secret WPF project I obviously won't talk about. But that means...

PowerShell arguments and encodings

Well, after fighting for an hour or two, I finally read a post explaining why my quotes were not passed around when invoking a script. Now that I'm using the...

WPF Attached Events Addendum

Some of you may remember my article on attached events. There's now more clarification from the WPF SDK blog. Considering the extensive email exchange I had ...

Service Pack on the way?

A while ago, Rob Relyea mentioned on the forums that they had someone working on community and bugs in the WPF team. I also remember reading a few days ago a...

Multiple mice and cursors on WPF applications

For those that want to do WPF development with multiple cursors, Microsoft released a new version of the MultiPoint SDK.  Download details: Microso...

Knowing which aliases are defined

[Update: Replaced -eq by -match as suggested on the PowerShell blog. Thanks guys, humbling to have you reading this blog. Tagging really does have a use :) ]...

Stupid word of the day

Heard in a corridor. This has great talkability. Maybe that's why I'll always have trouble with marketing. Of course the simplest form I can think of, This...

When digital was about digits...

A blog post over on Satisfy me reminded me of the good old Compuserve days. Oh yes I was there, and 100530,3355 was my ID! That was back when the Internet wa...

xsd.exe passed away, svcutil.exe is the way to go

I was reading Darren David's blog entry on code generation from xsd files. Sadly, he references xsd.exe that generates Xml serialization code. If you're usin...

Quickly know when you're in quirk mode

While debugging an application rendering issue yesterday (yes, I'm back to a bit of asp.net work, with CSS adapters and asp.net AJAX, oh the joy!) I came up ...

eScrum

For fans of scrum, Microsoft released eScrum v1. Not had the time yet to investigate it but it looks good!

Validation in WPF with Enterprise Library

A very good news for those that require enterprise Technorati Tags: WPF, .net3, winfx quality validation, there's now a project to integrate WPF validation ...

Silverlight Predictions and WPF Snippets.

On a break from blogging at the moment, service will resume when my new MacBook Pro arrives (new resolution, faster CPU, nvidia chipset and 4gig of memory), ...

Silverlight big announcement at MIX07?

I was reading the wpfbox blog about the MIX07 announcement regarding Silverlight (the new name for WPF/E).

Multiple default buttons the WPF way

Not from me, but from Neil, my future ex-colleague at Netstore: “Default” buttons in WPF and multiple default buttons per page.

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Another way to declare read-only dependency properties

Sorry for the hiatus this week-end, I spent a lovely time out of London, disconnected from the online world. Back online (in the train, with WIFI, fantastic,...

WPF Bug, TextBlock with empty element

A note for me as much as for everybody else (while waiting for the Connect website to be updated to let us fill RTM bugs). Having a TextBlock containing an e...

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Reusing the content of a Popup control

That one is far from obvious, and is what I'd classify as a bug. As soon as Microsoft fix the Connect web-site to let us report RTM bugs, I'll more than happ...

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Use Segoe UI on Vista and Tahoma on XP (and whatever else wherever else)

A question that's often asked is how to make it so that your elements in WPF use the latest greatest fonts on Windows Vista, but fallback nicely on Windows X...

WPF Tips n' Tricks – Have all your dates, times, numbers... in the local culture

This is the first instance of a series where I'll try to publish at least  Technorati tags: wpf, localization, bindings one trick a day you'll find usef...

Goodbye MacBook Pro, Hello PowerShell

Well, I am mourning the departure of my MacBook Pro to the hands of a thief in All Bar One on a friday evening with my colleagues. If anyone ever see a MacBo...

Very exciting news... A DataGrid!

Xceed just released version 1 of their DataGrid. We're super excited here, as it would mean not having to invest in writting our own for the functionality we...

Attached Events By Example - Adding an Activate event to any Selector element (ListView, ListBox, TreeView, etc...)

I couldn't resist using a long title. I've had this article on the back of my mind for a while but only managed to get in the mood for a big writing ses...

You know how it is sometimes...

.. you download stuff and you forget to even install it. I did that today with StyleSnooper. Added to my toolbox!

Going through my WPF backblog...

I use this post as a bookmark as much for myself as for others. Mike Hillberg talks about the Loaded and Initialized event, as well as about Trace sources in...

How to show different text based on an enum value?

This question was asked on the MSDN forums, so I thought I'd replciate it here for everybody's benefit. When you want to bind to a value that's an enumeratio...

To profile your WPF applications

Tim Cahill talks about profiling your WPF application. Not a new post but one worth knowing, bookmarking and using!

Blog or forum...

I've not been very active updating this blog. First, I'm in the process of setting up another blog that would support some stuff I have pending, and on my ow...

Using winmerge as a merge tool in Visual Studio Team Suite

Found in msdn, to change the diff/merge tool used on conflicts with TFS: Go to Tools > Options > Source Control > Visual Studio Team Foundation Serv...

2006

Thought of the day

Or the night rather... [Conditional("GRIDPARANOIA")] Yeah, I'd be suffering from a paranoid condition if I had responsability to code the System.Windows.Cont...

DependencyProperty inheritance doesn't cross the UserControl boundary!

Still got lot of work to do tonight but more on that tomorrow.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is released!

From Bharry's blog: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displayLang=en Finally. Pure bliss. Or...

Thought of the day

Music to buy. That's an interesting concept, and more and more people start buying their music rather than just copying their friend's iPod lists (or worse, ...

TFS and offline mode

Ah the joy of using TFS. Don't get me wrong, the server looks like a well architected and well thought source server. No, my real problem is the client. Firs...

Building a Vista Development machine

As I said yesterday, once most of the driver issues are resolved, it's time to install everything else. Gigs of it. So here's a list. I'll update as I rememb...

MacBook Pro Core2 Duo 17in just arrived!

Ah the pleasure of receiving new hardware. First and foremost, what a fantastic packaging. You can already feel this geeky chic pleasure just from the box. E...

WPF Snippets

VS Extensions code named Cider, that will stop shipping for Visual Studio 2005 after the November CTP (which means there won't be any more support as far as ...

Back? Yeap.

Oh it's been such a long time. I don't have the specific date of my last post on my former thetechnologist web site, but it was quite a while ago.

2005

Google querry and a hmmmm moment.

Hmmmm. Every morning I happen to check my referrers logs, to see who’s coming to see my rambling, how many subscribers, that kind of things....

Evil? Me? Mwaaah mwaaaaah...

I am 63% evil. I'm getting there. I haven't done all the damage I could do but I've done quite a bit. I'm just over the border into the ...

Making dasBlog (and ASP.net) XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliant

Over the last week or so, I’ve been modifying the dasBlog source code quite heavily to make it Xhtml 1.0 Strict compliant. I also want to ma...

Getting dasBlog to support Transparent HTTP Content Negociation

I started this entry as part of the Making dasBlog XHTML 1.0 Strict Compliant, but the subject is different enough that it really dese...

The google power

I said earlier how I thought that google was giving way too much power to blogs for the taste of the corporate world. I had a wierd proof of that...

Internet Explorer support started...

I added some form of IE support using the IE7 javascript toolkit... Now only thing left to fix for ie is the alpha blended png i use as a background, and for...

rel="nofollow" doesn't stop spam, it removes the incentive

I just saw (just before unsubscribing) Robert’s entry about the google nofollow attribute and how everybody, according to him, is wrong in t...

Do not upgrade to dasBlog 1.7 if you use crossPosting!

Group blogs...

Tim talks about the current trend in Entreprise blogging to have group blogs. I hear you my friend! I’ve been completely surpr...

About plug-in development and office...

Andrew writes about the 40 (!!) different ways of writing a plug-in, and this is just for Office. A quote that I find interest...

Internet Explorer support

As the few first people see the web page, I get pinged asking why it looks so bad on Internet Explorer. As you can notice, no Javascript on the page (except ...

Back online!

Yes it’s been a long time. But I’m back! And as you can see, with a completely new look! I’ll add the latest comments about the design to this blog en...

2004

Going offline...

This blog is going offline for a short while. Hope it will go back online soon. DON'T UNSUBSCRIBE!

Something's wrong with SauceReader

Today I checked my soon to be disconnected blog (although a friend of mine might be able to host it while I move), and was very happy to see...

Funny human nature

As I’m very much in a ranting mood… A few weeks ago, bored one night, I was cruising a wiki somewhere on the internet. ...

Alpha developers

Long time no blogging, I’m in the middle of a move to my new place. That does mean that I’ll loose my pagerank again when my blo...

How can I post from work when I don't post from work

Some of you might have noticed how my posts shows up during my work hours. The thing is, I don’t blog from work. I read, may ...

Back to normality... sort of.

I’m back to using word as my main blog editor. Is that useful? If you look at my usual spelling, of course it is!

Confusing Microsoft Servers story

This post is for all of you, b0rgs and marketing addicts working at Microsoft. And for you Scoble! I'm constantly reviewing new opportunit...

Yahoo blogging... Marketing marketing...

Just read from Scoble that Yahoo search team starts blogging... There's always a start, but this one looks like a PR announcement. Let's hope they ...

Transcription made easy

Still from Julien (am clearing my work backlog), this tool lets you transcript easily video and audio. I can think of a nice applciation for synche...

Serialization and code emitting

And finally, in the "I follow Julien's tracks", a really nice MSDN article about how the XBOX live team reads and writes data with their C++ clietn ...

Nice .net blog

A huge whole lot of interesting blog with a lot of stuff am researching right now: Rick. Discovered only thanks to technorati!

Morgan Stanley stuff

What is going on about Morgan Stanley in the Syndication world? Strategist Andy Xie warns about a "hard landing" in lot of sectors in C...

I Love bees...

While subscribing to Boing Boing (Yes I am building a second OPML at work, that contains different feeds than the ones I read at home, more focused on...

I am drooling...

From Julien, I want one of these! Badly! Wouldn't it go just fine in my future appartment i still have to find a correct mortgage to buy?

Counter productive

I am so used to outlook and newsgator, with my dasBlog plug-in, that I find it very difficult to blog from the web. The interface sucks, I like sma...

Back to blogging, already?

Ok, I'll admit it... I have a hard time not blogging at all! I spent the last few days talking with many people, both internally and exter...

Silent period

As you probably know by now, i joined morgan stanley last monday. The work is really interesting, and I would lie if I was to tell you i'm not already...

Lookin for a new C# job?

Are you an experienced highly technical C# developer? If you are, let me know, as my agency is looking for people to place into highly rated comp...

myApp.vshost.exe or when Visual Studio wanna be funky

JC asks what this new funky myAppName.vshost.exe is created at the same time as myAppName.exe… Well, this is used for debugger ...

Makes you think

An interesting reading (again) from Paul Graham. He’s the guy that wrote about the hundred year language, invented the Bayesian ...

I love being linked

You know, I just loved being linked. So when both Eric Gunnerson (Yeah, THAT eric!) and David link to my article about ReaderWriterLoc...

High post count == High traffic?

If you didn’t notice, my blogging rate is going up these days… But it seems this in turn gets me more people. My traffic has be...

Problems using the official msn client?

Just found this list of web clients. The Messenger FAQ. Enjoy!

Managed minidumps

 From eric, Scott talks about Managed Minidumps. Indeed, we lack some proper integration story, especially with the integrated re...

New layout

Just noticed that technorati has updated their front page with a really nice new layout. Sleek. 

For us non designers

If you’re like me, although your usuability and layout skills for web and windows apps are correct, you are absolutely blind and stupi...

Cubiks get a face lift

For those of you interested, Cubiks launched their new web site at www.cubiks.com and I must say it’s pretty clean. Well done to Suzy ...

CSS extensions for IE?

Just found this link: http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ named IE7: a simple extension that makes the most useful CSS extensions available. Doesn...

Color match for firefox

Yes, the previous link doesn’t work in firefox… Here’s another version for you: http://color.twysted.net/ ...

DOAP - bringing metadata to open source projects

Edd just launched the DOAP project, to define an RDF based description language for software projects. I have to wonder though, how sp...

What a day!

Thanks to the register, mary joe, scoble and others, this blog got it's biggest connection rate since its inception a year and half ago... 4200 connec...

Next month I'll be joining...

Lookout... Bought by Microsoft!

Just read that Microsoft was buying Lookout. I’ve been a huge user and supporter of that software since Robert mentioned it, and...

C# Express...

I downloaded c# express yesterday and started going through some performance analysis I am running for my next article… And I find so...

Back to the future and blog update

I just finished backing up my old old blog from somewhere on the web I won’t mention, and will republish these posts, for historical r...

AOP and Microsoft follow-up

Val does a good job of summarizing of the discussion Eric started on AOP and Microsoft technologies, and I thought I would add a bit ...

A valuable reason for ATOM

My brain has been wondering around lately, about how feeds and syndication can play with the whole service oriented paradigm and the GXA sta...

A Java bug

While debugging a former colleague code, a Java servlet running under TomCat, we found the following interesting bug (interesting becau...

What is all the frenzy with Rory?

I don’t get it… What is that with Rory attracting people like that? I can’t see anything interesting about an in-the-clos...

While we wait...

It’s terrible when you’re waiting behind the fax machine and nothing gets out… While waiting, I try to get busy with work...

Finally, the big news

Finally, I can speak about this big news. Here you go: 3:30: received copy of the offer letter by fax 4:30: meeting ...

The BOA has been hunted

Interesting conversations going around on high level business processing language… Here are the links for you people interested in it (Yes I am ...

Some very very important news for my life

I have a great news to announce, am just waiting to see the thing written down on paper before announcing it… I don&rs...

Eric on AOP, my answers

Eric asks here what scenarios would AOP encapsulate for us and would be useful for us. Here are a few I can think of: &#...

Ode to Eddie Izzard

I have to agree with Cyrus on that one… I fell in love with this comedian a few weeks ago, with the sexy show… It is so ...

IDE of the future, Richard is going to get what he wants

As I was reading Cyrus’ comments on embedding IDE editors in visual studio, and the realm of domain specific languages, it remin...

Blog is back, second edition

So, my server has been down for nearly 10 days… Other than loosing my googlejuice, this is a seriously annoying problem with hosting ...

Thread ids and Hashcodes

dasBlonde is blogging about the GetHashCode vs GetCurrentThreadId way of getting a thread id. Without knowing what exactly she is tryi...

Microsoft loosing the API war? Oh well...

(Please excuse the raw format of this post, it will get updated if I find something really awful in the next few days). As no ...

Life, Time and Nant

It’s already been two weeks since I posted anything. We’re in beta release of the software I’ve been working on for nearly...

XSLT and the missing xml declaration

I was wondering why oh why after my xsl-t transformations the xml header was not outputted correctly… And guess what, hidden as a sma...

XPathDocument Stream closing

Today I encountered a really annoying documentation bug in the xml side of .net. Whenever you create an XPathDocument using the Stream based...

ReaderWriterLock, Dispose pattern can also increase reliability

[Update 29/07/2004: Just updated the code, the old one was... broken to say the least :)] Following Ian’s snippet ...

Two way syndication, discussion continues

When I posted about Channel9 going live, I im’d Robert Scoble about it. He was kind enough to respond. Please also note from fee...

ISL 2

Here comes a second wave of links that I didn’t blog about. We’re reaching November 2003 at this point! Longhorn ...

Google have a new googlebot?

I was looking at my user agents on this blog, and what was my surprise when i saw this:

Only cdf feed on the net?

Don says that there’s probably only 3 active cdf feeds on the net. Nope! Every single user has it with dasBlog, and you can reac...

ISL 1 (Interesting Stuff List)

 And here we go for the first list (please remember my backlog go back to October 2k3 so some links might look a bit old. They are neve...

Channel9 live

Well well well, everybody is crazy over www.channel9.com these days, either loving it or hating it. Well, I have to admit that the experimen...

News

Thanks to all of you for caring. I'm finally starting to recover, at least on the physical side. Pills are burning my stomach, but when i go...

Game Development, where is directX going?

From gamespot, Microsoft announced a new toolkit that would work across Microsoft platforms to develop games. I can certainly understa...

http.sys included in windowsxp SP2

From Don, it seems the SP2 includes http.sys. This is the kernel http driver that is included in windows server 2003. Now a question f...

Enable the DCE in Longhorn POST PDC

This is something that has been running around for a few days but the blogosphere didn’t notice. You can enable the desktop compositio...

A hidden new feature in Service Pack 2

Just noticed while doing some clean-up work (as my machine seems to have gotten into some kind of neurotic reboot sequence…) that the...

XAML and asp.net

I wanted to blog about it for a while, but i just found one of the things i wrote on the longhorn newsgroups (yes, I will return to newsgroups startin...

The best tool for outlook

Well, I’ve been testing Lookout for quite some time now, and I must recognize that’s one of the best tool I’ve used. When ...

Monitoring Web Server online status

If you’ve been reading my blog regularly (and I know you’re about 25 around here J), you know I’ve been playing (and...

Installing XP Service Pack 2 RC1 & various stuff

As my life is insignificant and just plain boring these days, I’ve uninstalled beta2 of SP2 and am in the process of installing the RC...

Healthy Competition ?

Please note this post was a few days old but I just discovered it never got published. So here it is. Stefano asks in this ...

There we are

I am very happy to say that I went over the 4K+ messages in my backlog in only 3 days of relatively painful reading, and my backlog stopped ...

Url Rewriting

Jesse talks about URL rewriting and propose a, well, solution to the problem. I know where he comes from, but there’s a muc...

Catching up

I’ve been silent for the last few days as I impose on myself an absolute hiatus as long as I don’t finish my homework and read e...

Biztalk and SharePoint

Jan Tielens is really getting me hot on these two servers, and if I get some time I need to dig into them. Question to all of you, why...

Internationalization of applications

I was going over my backlog today (about 5k unread posts that I’m going to try and finish reading in the next few days), and noticed a...

asp.net and IIS follow-up

Following my article on asp.net hosting, Dave writes about this document that I could’ve used and have less investigation to do should...

Why I'm going silent for a while

I just want to let the people I like and also the people I talk to that I may not be very vocal on messenger, phone, or whatever. The techni...

Amsterdam here I come

We just arrived in amsterdam. The trip starts well, with a free upgrade in the hotel to a lovely one bedroom flat with view on amstel straat and the water...

Reading more, faster

As I’ve been quite ill for the last few days (don’t know if 39 degrees Celsius on wake up would be considered “quite&rdquo...

A new application block

The Offline Application Block went live. A few weeks ago, it was in beta on gotdotnet. Kudos to the patterns and practices group for a...

SOA messages being objects?

In the latest event in the discussion about SOA and objects with Steve, he responds to me the following: “I’d argue that yo...

SOA Debate still hot

In his post, Steve Eichert talks about whether objects used in SOA may or may not contain behavior. I’m just reproducing the com...

Googlejuice is back!

Hey hey hey… just noticed that the new URL to your beloved blog got up again in the googlescore: ·  &...

Asp.net hosting undocumented

I’ve wanted to write about the full ASP.net stack for a long time, and thanks to Roy, I now find the time and the will to go down the rabb...

WTF ~ ?

Today, Smon asks why isn’t the ~ operator is not defined for the byte type. It is the exact same problem for the bitshift operat...

What's to come

Just to let you know what I'm working on at the moment: An article on IIS undocumented, everything you wanted to know about aspnet_isapi.dll ...

London Dinner

Ingo talked about it here and  Benjamin here. Lovely restaurant, was nice seeing Ian and Benjamin agai...

Oh oh my dear...

I was looking at the automatic trackback notification in dasBlog today, and received a weird referral from google. http://www...

SOA Debate continues

 Benjamin shares with us his views on the great debate about what is a service. So the question is, what can be considered a...

London EuroCPian meeting Spring 2004

Just to let the blogosphere know about this.  Not sure if I’ll be there or not.

UK Blogging dinner (again!!)

A blogging dinner is being organised on the 15th here. I'll do my best to be here!

Up and down, up and down, up and down

Please bear with me while the server is going up and down, I’m far from being an accomplished network administrator. Moreover, my hard...

Googlejuice a month later

I have a few entries in my back log, will get them out of the door this week end. I’ve seen that very few people did stay sub...

ISA Server 2004

There will be a lot of posts today, I have quite a serious backlog and don’t want to do one of these HUGE posts that only Chris Brumme can successfully write.

Back Online - New Server

I’m back online, finally. I announced here that I would bring the blog back online the 3rd of January… So a month later here I am. Sorry for those of you who...

The london blogging dinner - People, Scoble and Toilets

So we had a blogging dinner. I was there, very good moment, nice beer, some very nice people, and overall nice conversation. W...

2003

Googlejuice

I just looked at my googlerank (you can never be too self-conscious), and guess what. Here are the few way to get me in the first page:

ObjectSpaces 1.0 Support for Other Databases

Andrew reports that version 1.0 of object spaces (the ORM technology to be provided with Whidbey next year) will only support SqlServer 200 and Yukon (the ne...

Lease Management, Remoting and Technical Reviews?

Interesting read on msdn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/12/LeaseManager/default.aspx

Virtual CD for Free - From Microsoft

A very handy utility is to be able to mount iso files as real cds. Microsoft have a Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP for that. From Scott. Cool.

Software Development Process and Marketing Bullshit

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. In scoble I try to believe. But there, you’ve gone too far. You went the commercial bullshit way. This is the quote I’m talking abou...

Road Trip Amusement

This one is too funny not to post. Moreover, Alex likes that kind of videos, and he’s one of my few regular readers that gives me some feedback on this blog,...

Blogging, How and Why : Metablogging

My eyes are feeling better, I’ll be back working tomorrow, and will finally put an end to a month of on and off development that is one of the most frustrati...

Low Blogging

Sorry for the low blogging these days. Since friday I can hardly see anything, because of a cornea infiltration. This causes swollen eyes (frankly I look lik...

Best C# 2.0 Feature

Everybody just constantly brags about how cool templates are. I have this very very strong feeling that I love them and that they’re going to render any code...

View Your Site Under Safari

From Matt, I went there and saw that my whole blog looks like crap with my current dasBlog skin. I really want to write a skin, but where on earth am I goin...

Veme Republique, Regime Parlementaire

Many out of band entries today, and my first post in French. I’ll be pleased to translate it back in English if someone asks for it.

Working 14 Hours a Day Cool?

Aaron tells us that working 14 hours a day is cool for him. I can certainly understand that. For many years, I was nearly coding 10 hours a day (yes, I was e...

Versionning and WinFS

Here, Jeremy asks if we want versioning in the file system.

Ingo loves his Hyper Threaded Dell 5150

I just wanted to blog it before Ingo does… He’s been waiting for his Dell for a few days, got it, and started ins...

At least one good article against Longhorn

As some of my beloved readers thinks I can’t give credit to someone slapping Longhorn, here is an article from eweek: ht...

More on Longhorn FUD

It seems my little entry generated quite a lot of feedback. Mostly I've been accused of just trusting Bill Gates word on groundless discussion. So her...

Longhorn FUD: Tony McCune Is Clueless

This article is one of the THE most stupid article I’ve ever read.

The Peer 2 Peer History, Part 1

Hello dear readers, as promised, the first part of my peer 2 peer history. I’ll try to remember what happened since I started being involved in this movement...

Longhorn DVD Are There

Oh, when the day ends just like that, things just get brighter.

The Most Frightening Pattern in .net

Am finishing my Task based MVC modifications to the excellent User Interface Process today, and here is one thing that comes over and over in my code. This p...

Life of a Longhorn Blogger

No new posts tonight. Scoble talked about it a while back, but when life becomes busy, things have a tendancy to go bad, especially if they can.

Blogroll - A French at Microsoft

Just wanted to say Hi! to Julien, a french working at Microsoft.

BitVector Replacement

A long long time ago, there was a discussion (and here) about the BitVector32 class being buggy. My main problem was that it was not feature complete, and I...

SharpReader 0.9.3.1

First, in an earlier blog, I said that I would pay a beer to my first reader using RSS bandit. Where are you?

Code Beauty

Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream]

Multiple Screens? Bring Some More\!

image previously at http://thetechnologist.is-a-geek.com/blog/content/binary/Office.jpg

TDD and Databases

I’ve read quite a lot of bloggers (here for example) complaining about removing records from their test database.

Is a Blog SOA?

From Fabrice, Julien which is a new comer, think his blog is a SOA service. I must say I so much disagree.

WinFS Interop

Ken ask a question on winFS interop. From what we got from the newsgroups (you should really come and see them), WinFS has two ways of copying file and metad...

The IDE of the Future, the Discussion Continues

Richard answers to my comment to his web site about the IDE of the future, and more specifically the XAML way of coding.

Welcome to my new readers

Just wanted to say hi to the few people who subscribed to this blog from RSS Bandit, and from the few mac addicts that say hello through Safari. Gecko...

First installation

Today was the big installation day. I didn't want to suffer the performance problems of running Longhorn under a virtual PC or a VMware installation, ...

Important news from the BBC

Well, had to post that one... Well, maybe would be a good time to install Unreal on all of our computers! (Dunno what the CEO would think abou...

Contract First web services, yes, that's the path to redemption

Christian Weyer gives us a very handy tool to experiment with the concept of contract first web services. For those of you not yet hooked up on t...

My first subscribed person!

I just saw that in my referrers: FeedDemon/1.0 RC2 (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/; Microsoft Windows) You know what that means? Yeah! One...

Lost first post

You know how it is, you start writing a huge entry, then midlessly click and bam, you loose your blog entry. How frustrating. One more reason to drop ...