Thomas Kuhn, Paradigms, NoSQL and the RDBMS

2010-01-25T18:06:00.001Z

It’s been a long time since I last blogged, and this may be the last time I blog here as I feel the title no longer adequately reflects my interests but… As I prepare my talk, on NoSQL generally and CouchDB in particular, for #DDD8 the applicability of Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm to the current NoSQL/RDBMS situation becomes more and more interesting for me. I’ll start by, in brief, stating

Building a Reusable Builder: An internal DSL in C#

2009-03-28T16:17:00.001Z

Sitting and enjoying the OpenSpace Coding Day at Conchango, and in particular enjoying Ian Coopers talk on Internal DSLs in C# I came to thinking how it might be quite simple to create a reusable builder object. I’ve done some posts on this sort of thing before, and have spent quite a bit of time recently at work constructing the beginnings of a Language Workbench (I say beginnings as I’m

Trying to Bind Form Elements in the View to a Dictionary in the Model with ASP.NET MVC

2009-01-22T19:04:00.003Z

I've got a class that has, instead of statically typed properties, a dictionary that is used to store different values depending on what is needed for any given instance. public class Baz { public Baz() { Foo = new Dictionary { { "Bar", null } }; } public IDictionary

Refactored: Fluent Test Data Builders Using Generic Extension Methods and Lambda Expressions

2009-01-19T22:52:00.006Z

Working further with the Fluent Test Data Builder I was working on yesterday has led me to refactor what I had, and the result is, I think, even nicer! I've added a new method SetValue, and changed the from getting the Member.Name to getting the PropertyInfo from the Member. The other significant change is that I'm now wrapping the SetLength and SetValue methods in try catch blocks so that I can

Fluent Test Data Builders Using Generic Extension Methods and Lambda Expressions

2009-01-18T02:33:00.002Z

Whilst writing some extension methods this evening to make creating objects in unit tests simpler I found myself writing methods that looked sufficiently similar to each other that I felt the code lacked a little DRYness. The code being written has to output a data extract in a fixed field length formatted text file. As such the length of the formatted fields is very important, so I had created

WCF With The Castle Windsor Facility

2008-12-06T22:26:00.011Z

Towards the end of a rather busy Saturday of coding in the office I decided to take on the exposing of some services at the boundary of a system I am working on. We're using the Castle project's Windsor container for our IOC on all of our new projects and so I figured that it would make sense to do a short spike into the WCF facility that ships with it to see whether this would be worth using

Continuous Integration with CI Factory part 2

2008-11-19T13:47:00.008Z

I've just finished setting up a new build instance with CI Factory. This time I used the latest version (1.0.1.5 at the time of writing). I followed the steps here, together with some from my last CIFactory post.I tried this time to add a property in Arguments.xml of this:< property name="MSBuild.Framework.Version" value="${framework::get-framework-directory('net-3.5')}" />In addition then I

Defending Scrum

2008-11-17T01:18:00.002Z

Recently Scrum has been taking a bit of a battering in the wider community, being made to take responsibility for some of the perceived failings of Agile. Under particular attack has been the scrum based certifications which are seen to churn out 'experts' on the basis of short courses. But who then in many cases lack the necessary expertise, of which experience is an important constituent, to

Continuous Integration with CI Factory

2008-11-14T19:58:00.012Z

For the project that I'm currently working on I've needed to set up an automated build process, no surprises there. Having worked in environments previously where the development and maintenance of the build occupied a large amount of effort, and required a reasonable amount of specialised knowledge I was keen to ensure that this would not be the case (it wouldn't be sustainable here). That in

Visual Studio 2010 (Rosario) - First Impressions (1)

2008-11-06T23:11:00.005Z

I've just gone through the pain of downloading each of the files required to extract the Visual Studio 2010 aka Rosario September CTP VPC. Why couldn't they use the Microsoft Download Manager??Anyway, first things first, I opened Visual Studio 2010 and went to the New Project dialog. The first thing that I noticed was that the MVC Framework is missing. Now I'm not surprised as it is yet to be

Searching, Ordering, and Paging with NHibernate

2008-10-27T00:06:00.002Z

For a while now I've been looking at ways of making it as simple as possible to create scalable searches and add ordering and paging to them when using NHibernate as my ORM. I read this article by Oren a while back and it has guided my thinking since. I had the pleasure of mentioning this to Oren at the last ALT.NET drinks in London. He grabbed Seb's laptop and threw some code together, code very

I Wish the Framework Team Used Interfaces More

2008-10-02T19:41:00.004+01:00

One of the things that often bugs me about the .NET Framework is that so many of the classes are written without an interface. A case in point is the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class. This is an excellent class and very useful. It extends System.Object, but it does not implement an interface. This is extremely frustrating!It's not that I would like to write my own version and swap it in, but I

Keeping code clean - Decorators for Error Handling?

2008-09-28T20:06:00.002+01:00

I read a review a few days ago of the new book by Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) 'Clean Code'. I'm going to order a copy as soon as I clear a couple of books from my current reading list backlog as it sounds interesting and the Uncle Bob blog on Object Mentor is one that I always enjoy to read. One of the things that stuck in my mind from the review was that the 'Do one thing' principle applies even

Testing DateTime Type Properties for Value Equality in Integration Tests

2008-09-28T02:36:00.002+01:00

I've just been writing some integration tests to ensure that some Repositories I'm writing work with NHibernate properly, basically ensuring that the mappings do what I want. The Repository classes in question use the latest release of NHibernate (2.0.0.GA) for their implementation and I'm using MbUnit for my integration tests.To try and save on the number of asserts that I have to write I

Uninstalling AVG Anti-Virus SBS Edition broke my MS Exchange

2008-09-23T11:42:00.002+01:00

The licence for my AVG Small Business Server 2003 Edition recently came to an end and after looking around I decided that rather than renew it I'd replace it with Microsoft's new Forefront products. This is probably vast overkill, but I figured it'd be interesting to see how it all works and I generally prefer vast overkill anyway.What I discovered was that it's quite an involved process to get

ASP.NET MVC - If it feels this right it can't be wrong!

2008-09-23T00:19:00.002+01:00

Having had a few days leave from work I've spent most of my evenings playing with the not-so new MVC framework. It's been great to spend some focused time playing with this new toy for web development from Microsoft. One thing that I've noticed is how nicely and quickly you can start to put together powerful, enterprise happy software with it. My starting point has been a model (a bunch of POCOs

Google Chrome

2008-09-01T22:00:00.002+01:00

Google this and you will find a slew of links talking about a new open source browser that Google are developing.Check this link for a scanned in copy of a comic book that is apparently being sent out to various chosen people/organisations. Also this link (same site) for a description.It looks interesting, a bit more competition in this space should be good. I just hope that they implement the

Getting Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' on to a VM - Part 2

2008-08-26T00:19:00.002+01:00

New day, and armed with the download of the Desktop version of 'Hardy Heron' I'm installing it on to a Virtual PC VM following the instructions that I found here: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2008/05/13/installing-ubuntu-8-04-hardy-heron-in-virtual-pc-2007.aspxAfter reaching the point where I have started the install on the desktop - so far so good. It already is looking far more

Getting Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' on to a VM - An Unhappy Saga

2008-08-23T17:32:00.004+01:00

I've been meaning to dip my toes into the Linux water for a while now - my last exposure being a brief one about ten years ago at Uni. Yesterday evening I thought I'd actually do it. My particular motivation in this case was to run Oracle, something I'm working with a lot at work, and I figured I might as well run it on Linux as not (although we run it on Windows at work). So, with my Ubuntu

NHibernate 2.0 is Finally Released

2008-08-23T17:20:00.002+01:00

I've just read on Ayende's blog that the final release of NHibernate 2.0 is now available. I've just got the latest release and TortoiseSVN just finished getting me the latest code now. That's my bank holiday sorted!

Simian - A Copy and Paste Code Hunter Killer!

2008-08-21T14:50:00.003+01:00

In my new(ish) job I have to look after a legacy application with a very large code base. Over the years this has been developed with a lot of copy and paste coding practices. This is a significant contributor to our 'technical debt' and certainly increases the costs of ownership associated with the application, adversely affecting troubleshooting, maintenance, and new feature development.I have

SQL Server 2008 is RTM!

2008-08-06T22:22:00.002+01:00

So SQL Server 2008 has finally made it to RTM. I can't wait to get it installed and to start seeing how the features look now, and how the performance compares. They're available now on MSDN and TechNet. So there they are, although I don't seem to be able to download the Developer version yet. Expect blog posts on this before long...

.NET 3.5 Microsoft Courseware with IEEE Computer Society

2008-07-30T15:04:00.003+01:00

I logged on to the IEEE Computer Society site for the first time in a few months today and got a pleasant surprise when I saw that at least some of the latest .NET 3.5 courseware is available free (usually £210.33 last time I looked) to members. It even includes courses on the ADO.NET Data Services and the Entity Framework.I've done a few of the course they provide before including the Certified

Resharper 4 Bug with 'Use Format String'

2008-07-28T11:58:00.009+01:00

I'd like to say first that I really, really like Resharper 4.0 and have made it my mission to persuade my boss to buy it for all of the Dev's where I work. I got my copy free at a NxtGenUG Southampton meeting and it continues to make my life as a developer easier.But...I've come across a small bug in Resharper 4.0 today, so I thought that I'd share so that others become aware.Real code has been

You Grok What You Eat

2008-07-19T15:37:00.002+01:00

Following on from conversations that I've had with various people recently it has struck me, and its' not a revolutionary thought, that my practice, and my thinking about my practice, is intimately linked to the feeds I subscribe to, the books I read, the events I attend, the people I chat with, and my work. So, as I finally got around to adding my ALT.NET Geek Code, I thought I'd write a short

Resharper 4.0 and Lambda Expressions

2008-06-19T12:52:00.003+01:00

Now I'm fairly new to the wonderful world of Resharper, so barely a day goes by where I don't discover something new about it, or through it. But today I found a feature that just made me want to share about it straight away. Let me set the scene. I'm coding a Lambda expression for use as a predicate and when finished I notice the now familiar little light bulb. Hmmm I thought, now what could

NxtGenUG Fest '08

2008-06-12T22:02:00.002+01:00

Just got back from an excellent day attending the NxtGenUG Fest '08 at Microsoft's campus at Reading. Like all NxtGen related events everything was smooth and incredibly well put together. I enjoyed all of the talks and some of them have definitely inspired me to go and hit the computer for a play. Mike Taulty's talk on ADO.NET Data Services was an excellent and engaging introduction to this

Revisited: Insufficient Permissions on web.config when delegating administration of a web site to remote users in IIS 7

2008-06-07T15:15:00.002+01:00

I have been meaning to return to this since I first posted on it and gave my talk about the remote management of IIS 7 at NxtGenUG Southampton. Well I've finally gotten around to it. This error occurred when remote administration of an IIS 7 web site and/or application is delegated to an IIS 7 user, and that user attempts to alter a setting of the site/application from a remote machine. The

Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 Licensing Change

2008-06-06T11:00:00.004+01:00

I'm looking into the licensing for TFS 2008 for my employers as my team are looking to migrate from VSS to TFS (hooray) and I have been asked to take the lead in this work. With TFS 2005 anyone who was going to raise issues (bugs, requests, and the like) in TFS, even if using the TeamPlain web client, had to have a valid CAL. This was a bit of an expensive pain and meant that at my last company (

Looking for a good developer

2008-06-04T21:07:00.003+01:00

Recently where I work we have been interviewing candidates for developer roles in our team. I have been involved in conducting some of these interviews and this has been causing me to reflect on other interviews I have been involved in, both as candidate and interviewer. Most of the candidates that I have seen, both recently and over the years, have been fairly strong when it came to their

Using TextFieldParser objects and the My library in C# code

2008-06-03T23:25:00.003+01:00

I read this article on InfoQ (a great site for information for those that don't know it) and saw that there might be some confusion about whether this useful class could be used in C# projects. The answer of course is yes. Just reference the Microsoft.VisualBasic dll in your project and away you go.The My library is a little different it does a whole bunch of different things, providing both new

Extension Methods - My new best friend*

2008-05-18T17:28:00.002+01:00

No that doesn't mean that I'm going to be [ab]using extension methods everywhere - though I suspect that extension methods could become the new singleton. That said I think that I am really starting to get them. Here's an example. Last night I'm doing some coding and I want to get some objects that I have written to serialise nicely to Xml. Now I don't want to give them public constructors as

The Price of .Net's Diversity

2008-05-13T21:47:00.004+01:00

.Net, since its' inception, has always tried to be a friend to everyone. A truly general purpose set of software development technologies. It offer both RAD and enterprise level development tools, dynamic languages, functional languages, type-safe languages, and OOP languages. With the Entity framework, Astoria, the DLR, dynamic data, and more shortly on the way the incredible breadth of the .Net

Insufficient Permissions on web.config when delegating administration of a web site to remote users in IIS 7

2008-04-17T00:43:00.003+01:00

****** Note: This post has been revisited with new, and better, advice here! ******Preparing a talk I'm giving at NxtGenUG Southampton tomorrow evening on IIS 7s ability to allow the administration of aspects of web sites and web applications to be delegated to non-admins I started to get a really frustrating error."Error: Cannot write configuration file due to insufficient permissions"I looked

FileStream (Sql Server 2008)

2008-03-24T01:36:00.002Z

The Filestream attribute is new to Sql Server 2008 (Katmai) and allows large binary objects (blobs) to be stored on the file system but to be managed by Sql Server. Since I first started looking into Katmai this has been the feature that I was most looking forward to because it solves a number of design challenges that I have faced in the past. Before the FileStream attribute was available if

Neil Does .Net