Subscribe
Posted on February 5th, 2010
It’s official! Scott Allen had a scheduling conflict, so I’ll be presenting IronRuby for the .NET Developer at MIX10 March 15th-17th, which is the culmination of a whirlwind of speaking events before that – Tools for Agility and Lean/Kanban Principles at the Southwest Florida Code Camp Feburary 27th, and a Blackberry 101 / J2ME TDD Session at the Day of Mobile in Chicago March 6th. Hope to see you at one or more of the events!
Posted on December 20th, 2009
For quite a while now, if you want to learn Ruby, you have the Pickaxe book, Why’s guide, and the fabulous Edgecase Ruby Koans on GitHub.
The Koans are especially interesting because all you really need to do is setup a working environment and go. It tells you what you need to do next, by way of running the tests and seeing what passes.
I thought to myself, why the heck don’t we have something like that for other languages? There are some obvious challenges – for example, doing it in .NET it has to be compiled, and some of the things don’t map well. But in the spirit of, “If you’re going to fail, fail as publicly as possible” I’m announcing the launch of the DotNet Koans.
The goal of the project is to eventually have a guide for C#, F#, and VB.NET – likely in that order. Ok, likely the first two, and hopefully some VB’r will jump on the third. Right now I have three of the twenty-five koans ported over – AboutAsserts, AboutNil and AboutArrays. I’ve hacked together a custom runner for xUnit.NET which tells you where you are every time you build.
My goal right now is to get everything ported over pretty much as-is, and then look at making sure this fits a good progression. For example, I don’t know if the Koans will lend themselves to LINQ, but that’s something that should be covered.
The project is now public up on GitHub at http://github.com/CoryFoy/DotNetKoans – feel free to download it, play with it, and contribute (or critique) if you’d like.
Posted on July 15th, 2009
This morning I was opening an ASP.NET project on my Win7 box in Visual Studio 2008, when a message popped up which only said:
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException
If you run into this, there are three things you need to do:
- Make sure you have IIS installed – This sounds silly, but since I had just rebuilt my box, I had forgotten to turn it on
- Make sure you are running VS as Administrator – if you haven’t mapped the ASP.NET Project to an IIS location, then Visual Studio will need Administrator privileges to modify the IIS metabase. Speaking of the IIS Metabase…
- Make sure you have “IIS Metabase and IIS6 Configuration Compatability” turned on – See Robert Boedigheimer’s article which was oh-so-handy.
There’s also a Microsoft Connect Bug that has already been filed and says it will be fixed in an upcoming service pack.
Posted on March 15th, 2007
Do you know C#? Do you know Design Patterns? Do you know Design Patterns in C#? Well, heck, you just know everything, don’t ya!
For quite a while, there has been a C# Design Patterns Group headed up by Damon Carr. It took a hiatus for a while, but is back in fashion. If you think you know your stuff, now is a great time to head over, because we are in the midst of a Decorator Pattern contest judged by Damon and yours truly.
Here’s the scoop from my post to the list:
We are looking for the best implementation of the Decorator pattern. What is the decorator pattern? According to the Gang of Four:
“Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing for extending functionality”.
To provide some framework to work in, this round is looking for decorator patterns that increment or decrement the price of a given object. For example, the base price of a car might be $5000 USD, and you can add on various aftermarket items like wheels, spoilers or really annoying tailpipes that increment the price. In addition, you might have incentives like a coupon, a discount plan or some other thing that decrements the price of the car.
Note that your implementation does not have to use the above example. You could use houses, boats, or green beans. The main rule is that none of the decorators can be mutually exclusive to cut down on the complexity.
Your application should:
– Allow for selection of a main item (at least one)
– Allow for selection of decorators (to either increase or decrease
the price) (at least 2)
– Calculate the total costWe don’t care if the app is a web app, Winforms, or Console. I care if you used Test-Driven Development, but pay no attention to that, because I’m just a judge, and it’s not like I’ll knock you points for not using TDD. Maybe.
Again, the deadline is March 31st. Prices and Participation may very. 2 week lease at 4% APR with automatic upgrade to Gold-infused Platinum edition at the end of term. Void where prohibited. Must take dealer stock by 3/31/07. Have a nice day if applicable in your jurisdiction.