Amit Gupta (sorry I got your name wrong before Amit) blogs about an interview with a spammer. Now I’ve had some spamming problems in the past and seeing that the number of comments that Spam Karma ate just keeps going up it seems to have been a good idea to install some protection. Continue reading “Interview”
Japanese
You gotta hand it to them Japanese folks – they sure come up with some great stuff. Take for instance this link to a lap pillow found while browsing around /\ndy’s Weblog. Continue reading “Japanese”
Lose
Check out an early preview here.
Update 20-02-05: I played the damn thing on my laptop and it was horrible. Half of the instruments could not be heared and those that could sounded so afwul that you’d wish you couldn’t. I already tweaked it but I haven’t uploaded a new version yet. I’ll leave the old file a little longer but it may very well suddenly be gone so if you’re in need of some unfinished and poorly mixed music you’d better grab it soon. Continue reading “Lose”
Object
About an hour ago I finished David West’s Object Thinking. It’s a great book and a must read for anyone who thinks that he or she knows object oriented development. He saved me from the clutches of the formalists and structured programming. Of course, I still have to convert the guys at work but at least I’m aware of the dangers. I thought I was doing OOP alright but it turns out I was misled by the formalists. So now I’m into Smalltalk (Squeak) to teach myself real object oriented ways without the bounds of an programming language in object disguise (Java, C#). It’s pretty different but I like it and see that there’s a whole new way to create software that the world is seemingly conveniently ignorant of. Continue reading “Object”
TDD
Lately, since I’ve started programming the .NET framework, I’ve become more and more interrested again in test driven development. Usually I’ve to write a lot of data access code but I never really found out a good way to unit test it. Luckily, Roy Osherove has written a very nice article about it on his blog. His solution is very elegant and seems to work like a charm on SQL server but unfortunately (according to the feedback on that article) there are some problems when trying to use this approach on another DBMS. Continue reading “TDD”
Syntax
It has been a while since I last posted but that’s because I’m going slightly crazy with this syntax highlighting business… Ok, I had a very basic version working on a RichTextBox but this control is an absolute nightmare to work with. It has all kinds of properties and events but it lacks those which you really need. Also, it’s very slow, bulky and subclassing it with syntax highlighting facilities seems like a task devised by Satan himself.
Because I don’t want to spend a lot of money buying a control for software that I plan to release in the open source domain I have undertaken the rather ambitious task of building my own custom syntax highlighting, semantic parsing and fast performing text editor control. Most of my inspiration comes from Actipro’s SyntaxEditor and Syncfusion’s Essential Edit controls in the form of help files, api specs and samples but I still have a hard time coming up with the internal implementation.
However, today I accidently stumbled across xacc (see also leppie’s blog) which contains the AdvancedEditor control. This is a pretty good example of how to implement effecient real-time syntax highlighting in a Windows Forms application. The AdvancedEditor control does not subclass the dreaded RichTextBox but instead, it inherits from Control and provides a custom text editor implemenation. This code has the potential to be extremely useful although I find it a little bit hard to read because I’m not used to reading between a lot of compiler switches. Continue reading “Syntax”
ViewState
Aaargh! Why is my ViewState so large? Even when setting the EnableViewState property to false for each control and the page itself there’s still an enourmous amount of ViewState… How can this be?
Well, it turns out that there are some other items that get stored in the ViewState. We’re in luck though because Paul Wilson has written this article with (supposedly) everything you ever wanted to know about the ViewState.
That should clear up a few things. Continue reading “ViewState”
Amun
Amun is a basic SQL sandbox. It is designed to be a reasonably friendly and safe environment (hopefully in the future – at this point you can do pretty much everything your database allows) in which you can build and try out connection strings and SQL commands. One of my collegues tried out a previous version and I have seen him using it a few times so maybe it’s useful to other people too. It’ll will be a little bit longer though before I dare to release it to the public but I plan to do a lot of work on it this weekend. Continue reading “Amun”
Page
This is something that I have pondered on multiple times – what’s the best way for a UserControl to communicate with its containing page or another UserControl on the same page? Well, even though I already have found out most of the techniques in this article by Karl Seguin, it’s always reassuring to read that someone else arrived at the same conclusions. Continue reading “Page”
.NET
This article by John Sample gives some handy pointers on how to use bitwise operations on enum types in .NET. Especially useful if you need to store related boolean values like user rights or settings. Continue reading “.NET”