Here’s my (growing) list of must read biographies of computing industry superheros. All of these books are based on real life stories and events, and despite my short attention span, I have found them all to be extremely captivating. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution by Sam Williams ...
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#. ...
Recently I migrated my hosted FunnelWeb ASP.NET MVC blog over to Octopress (a Jekyll based blogging framework) running on Amazon S3. This is a little personal reminder of how sweet it is to spawn a new post. rake new_post["title"] Edit newly created YYYY-MM-DD-post-title.markdown in octopress’s source/_posts directory rake generate cd public ponyhost push www.bencode.net Thanking Moncef Belyamani for his uber useful post How to Install & Configure Octopress on a Mac.
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 ...
Frameworks like ASP.NET are well equipped with templating engines, and more so now with the extensibility that ASP.NET MVC offers (can run with the awesome Razor view engine, or swap in a view engine of your liking such as the excellent Spark view engine). Simply put, a views template is responsible for transforming a model into a representation. A T4 text template is a mixture of text blocks and control logic that can generate a text file. The control logic is written as fragments of program code in Visual C# or Visual Basic. The generated file can be text of any kind, such as a Web page, or a resource file, or program source code in any language. ...