Category: General

Something so simple, yet so seemingly undocumented… After struggling for about 10 minutes with trying to clear a TkCanvas from Ruby, and only finding what seemed to be one message discussing it (but not answering it), I stumbled across the answer – delete(‘all’). So, if I have a canvas like this: def initialize(parent)  @parent = parent  ph…

(Update: James updated his blog entry with a list of resources to good D/I articles [here and here] which discuss much better the topics below.) James Shore has a new post about Dependency Injection, which he calls a “25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept.” While his examples were indeed examples of D/I, he seems to…

A few weeks ago, several coworkers and I went to the No Fluff Just Stuff Conference (overviews here, here, and here.) During the conference, I got to hear Dave Thomas speak about the Dreyfus Model for Skills Acquisition. A lot sounded familiar, and that was because Dave touched on a lot of the same points…

So, let’s pretend you are happily coding along in C#, doing test-driven development, and you get to a method that needs to return a message that spans multiple lines. Say, an address printer that prints out like: Cory Foy12345 Developers WayColumbia, MO 12345 So what is the test you should write? How about: [Test]public void…

Brian Button officially announced the St. Louis Code Camp coming up May 6th and 7th. I know Brian has worked hard to bring it here. I spoke at the Charlotte one, and had great fun. It isn’t often you get to go directly into a Microsoft campus and talk about open source tools, and even…

CARFAX’s own Gary Brown has gotten together a group of XP enthusiasts to form the Mid-Missouri XP User’s Group. The first public meeting is tonight at the CARFAX offices in Columbia, MO. Several people who attended the NFJS Conference in St. Louis, myself included, will be doing a panel discussion on various topics, including the…

John Currier, a former CharJUGger, released a tool a while back called Schema Spy. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It generates graphical dependency diagrams of your database, including things like implied constraints between tables. Anyway, he sent a post over to the CharJUG mailing list saying…

What a whirlwind weekend. I wasn’t sure how I was going to fit any more information in today, but somehow I managed to. I decided to get some more Java in today, and play with some more tools I hadn’t played with yet. I can’t stress enough how great this conference was, and they are…

As I expected, today was just as intense as yesterday, except longer. Some great sessions, and great information. I found out a fellow Missouri blogger – Duane Keys is around here, though I don’t think I’ve run into him. Hopefully next time we can get the name badges to be a little bigger – at…

In a day that starts with being told to stink less and earlier, and ending in dinner with Dave Thomas, Bruce Tate, Justin Gehtland and a host of people from the St. Louis Ruby group, it’s amazing that so much was packed into just a half a day. Here’s what you missed by not coming…