January 2007 Entries

Thanks to all the folks who attended my session at the Victoria Code Camp.  I know it was a little rough and having the VPC not respond to the keyboard was more than a little frustrating. I have cleaned up the code so that it is now in the state that I intended to reach by the end of my presentation.  You can download it here. Here are some of the great resources that I have found for introducing you to nHibernate. Oren Eini (nHibernate God) -- www.ayende.com nHibernateEg project -- http://nhibernate.sourceforge.net/NHibernateEg/ Billy McCafferty's Best Practices --...

I hadn't wanted to post on this until we got something a little more concrete.  Apparently Roy wanted to build up the tension a little bit.  Since nobody reads Roy's blog and everyone reads mine, I'll put the information into public domain.  We (D'Arcy mostly) are working on getting Roy Osherove to do a user group tour in Canada after he gets done presenting at DevTeach. This is very tentative, but also very exciting.  Here's hoping that we can make this happen.  It would be a May trip to Edmonton so I'm sure we can convince Roy that the 50%...

I have a distant admiration of Robert Scoble.  He's doing things in new ways and that's admirable, but sometimes I read his posts and I think "WTF?"  This morning was one of those times.  Wee Bobby posted a bit of a rant about the fact that Engadget didn't pick up his vidcast about Intel's recent breakthrough in chip manufacturing.  I say Wee Bobby, because the post came across like some 8th grade kid complaining because his book report was given an A not an A+. I understand that Scoble is excited about a great interview on a topic that was headline...

I'm out at Victoria International Airport in the fog.  Thick fog.  So thick that I can't see the light posts 100 ft away.  Flights are being canceled, but it looks like the fog is rolling out.  It's kinda neat to see actually.  I've watched it slowly move down the airfield revealing one building, tree and light post at a time.  I'm pretty sure that the cancellations are over and that the day is going to be fantastically beautiful.  It's a shame that I'm not getting to spend it in this city.  Instead I get to go back to Edmonton where...

Nolan Zak and his crew put on a fabulous event here in Victoria.  The UVic facilities were fantastic.  Three rooms, each with a podium where the speaker just had to plug in their laptop to the power and the projector, and each with dual projection screens for the attendees.  The level of technology used in the rooms, as well as the amount that was available to the attendees at their desks, was frightening.  The seating area had power and Cat-5 for everyone.  The facility had wireless web access (intermittently) as well.  I'd love to find this kind of place for...

So I just got into Victoria in advance of the Victoria Code Camp.  The cab ride from the airport was a long one, but I did see some interesting things.  First, every Victoria Yellow Cab that I saw (all 4 of them) was a Toyota Prius.  I have never seen this before.  It makes perfect sense to me, but I doubt you'll ever see it in the land of the Cowboy Sheiks.  The other thing that I noticed was that all the public transportation (buses) seemed to be double deckers.  Not the old style British ones that you may think of in Victoria,...

We all know how annoying it is when you're surfing the web and you're greeted with a cascade of never ending pop up windows.  I saw the same thing happen yesterday at work, but instead of with popups it was with defects. The goal of the day was to finish the last of the defects, push the fixed assemblies them to the system integration test environment and freeze the code before a release to production.  I wasn't overly involved with the process (I'm already hard (ly) at work on the next major release of the software), but I did see the effects...

This past week we upgraded our CCNet server from v1.0 to v1.1 and encountered a few issues.  The first number of issues that popped up were most definitely caused by the networking departments insistence that they push the new version down to the build box.  They of course got it wrong, we uninstalled their attempt and installed v1.1 ourselves. After successfully connecting to the server using the CCTray tool, we began to test the ability to click through and see the Dashboard.  This worked fine, but anytime that we attempted to drill down into one of our projects we were...

Next Saturday (January 27th) I'll be in the beautiful city of Victoria to speak at the Victoria Code Camp.  My topic...Introduction to nHibernate.  So if you're in the vicinity of Victoria, drop by and watch one of the presentations that is in the same time slot as me.  I'm sure it will be worth your time.

The good folks over at O'Reilly are '...unilaterally declaring Friday, January 19th to be "Windows Developer Tools Day."'  They're tying this to the launch of the new book by Jim Holmes and James Avery titled "Windows Developer Power Tools". In the spirit of this, I'm going to list a few of the tools that I currently can't live without. Cruise Control .NET ReSharper nUnit nCover nAnt MS VPC & MS Virtual Server SlickRun Notepad++ SysInternals There are a number of others that I use regularly, but these are my daily tools right now.

Last night Miguel made the long journey from the Garden State to the City of ex-Champions.  We warmed it up so that the foreigner didn't have to talk about getting frostbite while typing.  The start of meeting was met with a small technical glitch (apparently Miguel's laptop rejected the notion of working in the cold so it switched to tablet mode), but we got that sorted out in relatively short order. Miguel's presentation was great.  He covered the Provider, Plug-In and Chain Of Responsibility patterns showing how his one code example evolved with the implementation of these patterns.  For our...

I know when people read this they think I'm being facetious when I say I live in an igloo and on an ice flow.  Well let me tell you, it's not all fun and games up here.  After a wonderfully brisk walk to work this morning (the ice flow has run aground) I heard through the mukluk telegraph that the walk home might not be have me skipping and whistling.  I went over to the Canuck Bison and Caribou online and looked at the weather report.  Once again, the mukluk telegraph was right.  I love it when you can see the b-word on...

In the past the most that I've ever used serialization is the automated kind that you get with web services.  I've recently been looking into some stuff that could use the power of serialization to eliminate thousands of lines of code that is custom serializing.  Today I decided to take the little bit I knew about the technical situation (some dummy left all that stuff at work) and do some exploratory coding.  Here's what I found out. Output format The output format that we need to generate is not something that is intuitive to programmers.  Below is a snippet of...

Anyone who has seen me harp during a code review knows that I promote and practice defensive programming.  I don't like to leave anything to chance when I write a public facing piece of code.  It's my code...I'm advertising how it works (XML comments please and thank-you)...ergo, I'm responsible for how it reacts to various possible inputs. How did this train of thought start?  Well, at work I've been in a series of seemingly endless meetings to discuss the documentation requirements for coded service interfaces provided by one technical team to another.  There are a number of reasons that the meetings...

Like a number of other people, I find chain letters, endlessly forwarded jokes and these blog chains quite challenging.  Don't you think that there's enough mindless drivel on the web with me adding to it.  On top of that I already have posted the 5 things that will most likely make people walk by me and not say "Hi".  I will not post another 5 just because D'Arcy and James have asked me to.  Instead I'm doing this to see if I can evolve this blight on the internet.  My inspiration is James saying that he broke a toe once...

  We are having another great presentation at Edmug in January.  This time, with the help of INETA, we've been lucky enough to get Miguel Castro out of New Jersey. **Please note that this event is on Monday, January 15th.  The location and the times are the same as usual.

I wanted to write some things down so I can clear my mind and, hopefully, approach 2007 with a different perspective.  These aren't New Years resolutions.  These are career oriented and hopefully this career will go beyond the end of 2007.  Also, this is a living document. I will set aside time to review code that I wrote in past years I'm hoping that this will help me in a number of areas.  The first would be to allow me to grow technically and critically reviewing code is a great way of doing this.  Reviewing my own code doesn't allow for the...