Dev

Well, after wanting to do this for years, I finally bit the bullet and enroled in the infamous Machine Learning class run by Andrew Ng through Coursera and Stanford. Professor Andrew Ng is Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford, with 20 professors and about 150 students/post docs. The first revision of this course ran in 2008, where Andrew started SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere), which was Stanford’s first attempt at free, online distributed education. ...

ReSharper (R#) is a tool that I use, love and recommend for anyone who uses Visual Studio. The immediate benefits that it brings and the sheer productivity boost that you gain from using it makes Visual Studio a pleasure to use. I have been using R# for about 2 years now, and keep discovering new gems every now and then, from other R# fans. It compliments Visual Studio so well, sometimes you don’t notice that you are actually using R#. ...

Spring provides dependency injection capabilities using Setter injection, or Constructor injection. Object models can then be declaratively represented in XML. Here’s a Setter injection based example using the property element: <bean name="shaker" class="net.bencode.model.Shaker"> <property name="proteinPowder" ref="proteinPowder" /> </bean> <bean name="proteinPowder" class="net.bencode.model.ProteinPowder"> <property name="grams" ref="120" /> </bean> Or if XML isn’t your thing, annotations are also an option, using a combination of @Component and @Autowired. @Component public class Shaker { @Autowired private ProteinPowder proteinPowder; ... } @Component public class ProteinPowder { private int grams; ... } Constructor injection is similarly defined using the constructor-arg element. The following example works if the Shaker class has a constructor that takes in a ProteinPowder instance: ...

Building native Windows application with C++ can be done using a variety of techniques, from handrolled win32 to MFC. Some uglier than others. Using some ATL macros, here is the most minimalist implementation I could find, that will get you a native Windows desktop shell up and running. Here’s a skeleton native Windows desktop application that uses ATL (Abstract Template Library) as a thin wrapper on top of the underlying Windows scaffolding (e.g. the winproc, the message pump and so on). Compared to hand rolling this plumbing yourself, ATL (although its largly macro based) keeps the code lean and mean. I plan to use this as a shell DirectX render target for testing. For buildable VS2012 solution see github. ...

Installation steps for getting a functional Clang++ build running on Windows 8 and MinGW. Step 1 Install MinGW. Using mingw-get-inst-20120426.exe go with the pre-packaged repository catalogues, which bundles in GCC 4.6.1 as opposed to 4.7.x, which at the time of writing Clang does not support seemlessly. You will need the C Compiler, C++ Compiler, MSYS Basic System and MinGW Developer Toolkit MinGW packages. Step 2 Python 2.x. Install the Python Interpreter and Libraries into c:\MinGW\bin. ...

Well, the dust is starting to settle after an amazing geek-out week at the gold coast with the Mexia team. Pre-TechEd Australia 2012, we kicked off with the Mexia’s “Code Camp 2.0”, an opportunity for the team to come together and deep dive (hack code, whiteboard, design and discuss, present) on emerging Microsoft technologies. It was epic to say the least. One technology that particularly excites me is StreamInsight. Perhaps because my brain has become so conditioned to the existing data storage techniques (relational, normalisation, warehousing, ETL, etc…) that we regularly apply in the industry, when I first learned of StreamInsight or Complex Event Processing (CEP), it seemed such a natural and elegant fit for so many common data problems we aim to solve today. ...

My experience preparing for and gaining the TS Windows Communication Foundation Development 4 certification. The (~7 year old) WCF stack to my suprise, is much larger than I ever gave it credit for. 70-513 successfully pointed me toward a number of “off the beaten track” topics, so much so, that I actually quite enjoyed preparing for this exam. Lots of emphasis in the exam on topics such as routing, diagnostics, transactions, sessions and discovery. ...

The VS11 beta includes a really slick cheatsheet style F# language reference. A gem for groking F# syntax. The samples are grouped into modules. A module is just a collection of value, function and type definitions. To execute the code in F# Interactive, highlight a line of code and then either type Alt-Enter, or right-click and choose “Send to Interactive”. To start F# Interactive, see the “View” menu. For more about F#, see: http://fsharp.net ...

When its comes to managing and supporting WCF services, like any software, having insight into erroronous situtions is essential. There are several ways to go about this that are specific to WCF, such as enabling a trace listener for example. A more customisable option involves fleshing out an IErrorHandler. As put by MSDN, provides the necessary hooks to run custom error processing logic. Allows an implementer to control the fault message returned to the caller and optionally perform custom error processing such as logging. ...

Autofac (a .NET IoC container) makes .NET code better. Simple. Controlling the way software interacts with it’s components (dependencies) is one powerful way to the increase its “bendability”. Bendability meaning how well a chunk of software is able to cope with change (this is inevitable). WCF’s unique object model (bindings, endpoints, behaviors, contracts, etc) can make doing IoC more of a challenge, however Autofac’s native WCF integration comes to the rescue. ...