Tech

Isn’t it funny how one’s tastes change as maturity progresses? I used to spend my summer holidays at the sea-side, playing in arcades and seeking the perfect milkshake (lime); more recently I’ve been spending them in the highlands, playing on the hills and seeking the perfect dram (lagavulin).Hmmm… I think I may have mentioned that the wife is away in the States for a while.At the start of this period of solitude, I panicked, wondering whatever I could do with myself, and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to buy a computer game to while away the hours.After all, I spent much of my formative years killing time on a variety of computer and console games, so why not rekindle that prior love affair? So it was that I bought The Sims 2, a truly excellent game, and had an enjoyable evening trying to motivate my wee Sims to improve their skills, better themselves, and generally enjoy life.All good harmless fun. ...

If you like maths problems, and you like programming (and hey, who doesn’t?), then you’ll love Project Euler.

Paul Welter has backported the System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class from .NET 2.0 to 1.1. Handy. http://weblogs.asp.net/pwelter34/archive/2005/07/01/416999.aspx

I know it’s a rather geeky and dry subject, but I found this MSDN article on new recommendations for using strings in .NET 2.0 quite interesting. It’s going to be difficult to stop using CultureInfo.InvariantCulture habitually!

Up at 0500 yesterday and onto the early GNER Mallard down to that London town for the MSDN briefing on eXtreme programming with .NET. It was pleasant not to be driving for a change, and speeding through the Yorkshire countryside early on a midsummer morning was very relaxing – what a stark contrast with the hot crowded tube that I had to catch on arrival to the big smoke. Three stops down to Oxford Circus seemed to last as long as the entire preceeding train journey. How people do this every single day I do not know.. ...

I succumbed to temptation and bought another book at the MSDN briefing yesterday, pausing only out of concern that the guy who mans the Computer Manuals stand at these events might think that I’m stalking him (or fancy him!). Having determined that I could hand over my Barclaycard whilst flashing my wedding ring, I brought my current reading list up to three: Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer – this was a wedding present from my mother-in-law and is proving to be an interesting, easy-going read so far. My competencies lie in the middle tier and database, and although I’m technically capable of making GUIs, I prefer to leave the design up to others. It’s inevitable though that most coders end up doing some design, and this book is, er, designed (sorry) to help with that process. The early section of the book concentrates on each UI element in turn, whilst the later part of the book looks at putting it all together, and has particular focus on the web – layout design patterns and interaction patterns. It’s a good read, making a nice contrast from the heavier books, and I’m pleased to learn that I’m not alone in hating Outlook’s labyrinthine Tools->Options dialog! ...

Elizabeth Keogh has been blogging her advice for software-developer apprentices, and recommends buying and reading a selection of good software development books. I think this is sound advice – personally I felt that my career and abilities starting taking off when I stopped reading tech-specific Wrox tomes that were obsolete within six months of publication and started buying timeless Addison-Wesley hardbacks. Why so many newbie coders insist on rediscovering solutions to well-known problems instead of leveraging the knowledge of our programming forebears is beyond me, but most of us have behaved in this way at some point. Give yourself a leg-up and read some decent software design books. ...

There seems to have been a lack of .NET-related stuff on this blog recently, so let me show you something I cobbled together for work purposes last Wednesday: A common requirement we have in our ASP.NET applications is how to reliably persist object instances for a lengthy period of time. End users shouldn’t have to concern themselves with the concept of Session expiry, and it’s unacceptable for them to return to their PC after nipping off for a coffee to be confronted with the dreaded “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” when they try to continue editing their basket / sales order / timesheet / whatever. ...

Never underestimate the stupidity of users—or the benefits of a little field validation. One of the web-based systems I’ve been developing allows users to enter a customer’s fax number and automatically fax confirmation details (using Zetafax). It’s been working pretty well—until we discovered a flaw today. One user, tired of obtaining valid fax details from customers, had been entering a string of nines and then actually attempting to send the fax to this number. ...

Via Eric G. Harrison – MS have developed a SQL Server Best Practices Analyser Tool. It’s like a cross between FxCop and Baseline Security Analyser, for SQL Server. Very useful. I just downloaded it, ran it against some of my databases, and it made some useful suggestions. This could quickly become indispensable.

Ooh, this is great news: http://nxopinion.robertsoninstitute.org/blogs/rcecil/archive/2004/11/11/167.aspx It’s a little thing, to be sure, but I often find myself wanting to make a setter internal or private while leaving the getter public. So, I’m happy. It doesn’t take much 🙂

Late last night I was doing some development work on a website for our investment club. I had a strongly-typed collection of “Stock” objects, and wanted to be able to sort them on any parameter (StockName, SharePrice, Volume, MarketCap, etc..) in either descending or ascending order. I didn’t want to have to write a separate comparer for each property. Reflection to the rescue! Below is a GenericSorter class, the use of which allows for the development of a Sort() method on the collection taking as a parameter the name of the property on which to sort. Smart. ...

There’s so much good open-source .Net development going on these days – .Text, nGallery, nUnit, etc – it’s a really interesting time to be a developer. My colleague Colin just drew my attention to nHibernate, an object persistence library for relational databases. TheServerSide.net has an excellent article summarising its use. Having just finished a long project where a large amount of time was spent writing “plumbing” code to persist objects to and from a SQL Server database, I’m finding the idea of using an O/R mapper such as this very appealing the next time round. Just as incorporating the MS DAAB block into solutions has reduced the amount of data access code required, I’m hopeful that embracing frameworks such as nHibernate will leave us with more time to spend focusing on addressing the business needs and less on re-solving technical issues. ...

A major project I’ve been working on for the last ten months has just gone live, giving me some time recently to take stock, do a bit of R&D, and catch up on some reading. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach things better in the future, and to this end, I’ve just finished two very different books about the software development process. O’Reilly’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide is a handy little summary of the approach (only 81 pages), depicting a near-utopian development shop where everyone is happy, and projects come in under budget and on time. It got me quite fired up, actually, and some of the concepts described are interesting. But deep down, I just know this would never happen in the real world—too much politics, too many personalities at play in the workplace, in my humble opinion. ...

Update (25/02/2006) – Hey, we now have String.IsNullOrEmpty, you know! What’s the quickest way, in C#, to test whether a string is empty? This is a question which came to my mind yesterday. I’ve always been fond of: if (myString==String.Empty) but it occured to me that this necessitates the creation and destruction of a second object (the empty string with which we’re comparing), so maybe it would be quicker to write: ...