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IE8 beta 2 initial thoughts (1 of n)
When the first beta for IE8 was announced I rushed out, downloaded it and installed it eager to see what the IE team had been up to ... Well let's just say that the beta lasted about 5 days on my machine before it was removed. The best thing about beta 1 was the uninstaller that actually removed all traces of the beta properly. So when beta 2 of IE8 was announced last week it was with some skepticism that I hit the download link, and with even more doubt that I installed it. My initial thoughts...
Posted: Sep 01 2008, 08:46 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with 9 comment(s)
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The Daily WTF
There used to be the best website, called the Daily WTF, out there where as a developer you could submit the most ridiculous gems of "code" you happen to stumble across in your everyday existence... Reading through the various posts and comments used to provide me with some light hearted relief knowing that we walk amongst some very "special" people that call themselves developers. The site appears to no longer exist or has change guise. Something about it's not PC to ridicule...
Posted: Feb 04 2008, 02:40 PM by Ryan CrawCour | with 2 comment(s)
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MSDN Subscriber site implements great error handling ....
So with all the hype about Visual Studio 2008 that has RTM'D I rushed on over to my favorite browser and headed off to the subscriber download site; only to be greeted with the following ... Let's hope the product is better than the download site! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
Posted: Nov 19 2007, 12:31 PM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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The value of decent & descriptive exception messages and the BizTalk adapter for BizTalk 2006.
I am currently working on this really cool integration project where I'm automating a number of business processes using BizTalk orchestrations. The data comes in through a variety of sources and trading partners and ultimately gets pumped in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 using the adapter built by MS. One of the gotchas that I ran into was on create / update I was getting an error coming back from CRM saying the following: "Error Description: Input Xml is having some invalid attributes"...
The Utopia of software development ....
Let me start out my saying that I simply love the writings of Joel Spolsky [ more about him ], CEO of FogCreek Software , and have been a follower of his well written and well thought out essays on software development and management on his Weblog "Joel on Software" ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com ). He has also published a number of great books on building good software and good software companies, many of which already have a home on my bookshelf. One of his earlier articles he posted...
C++ vs C# vs VB.NET
OK this post isn't really about this, so lemme back track a little and then you'll see where I am coming from with this. I am the proud owner of Programming C# by Jesse Liberty (Great book on the whole). Whilst skimming through it this morning looking for something particular I noticed an interesting sidebar on page 73, Creating Objects, shown below for those who have not got the book on hand to flip to... "VB programmers take note: while there is a performance penalty in using the VB...
Posted: Aug 02 2007, 10:17 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with 4 comment(s)
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How to write code with invisible ink ....
I stumbled on this pretty cool article by Tim Rayburn on the use of System.Diagnostics.Debug .... "There is one very important thing you need to know about this object and all its methods: You are writing code in invisible ink! Now I am sure you are going, "that's it, Rayburn has finally gone off the deep end." But hear me out! " class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { Debug.Assert( true , "Vanishing code!" ); } } The stuff mentioned herein only applies...
Posted: Jul 20 2007, 07:09 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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Refactor this, refactor that .....
I am sure you have all at least heard of ReSharper from Jetbrains and perhaps like me you figured what's the big deal .... Why should I go buy yet another Visual Studio plugin that does what Visual Studio already does out of the box ..... Well lemme tell you a story .... It all started the other day when I had the "privelage" of doing some peer development. I sat and watched (and added input every now and then :P) and was amazed at what I saw. With a few simple keystrokes I couldn't...
Posted: Jun 05 2007, 07:59 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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Recursive lambda expressions
I feel it very neccessary at this point to warn you that this is most certainly not for the faint hearted ... As the author, Dr T. , of the original post says; this might not be practical but it sure is fun. "People sometimes complain that you cannot write a lambda expression that is recursive. Good old factorial, for instance, how to write that as a lambda expression? " .... [ read more ] believe it or not, but the line below is the single simple lambda function to implement the good old...
Posted: May 24 2007, 07:11 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with 2 comment(s)
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New plugin for Ludz's Reflector
All this talk of Silverlight has got me stoked .... the problem is two-fold, firstly I aint a web developer by any stretch of the imagination and secondly I just do not have the time to sit and play with the technology when there are just so many new toys out on the net at the moment; so when i came across this niffty little plugin for Lutz Roeder's Reflector . "It that takes a URL to a Silverlight page and finds the assembly for that page. It also loads up the JavaScript and root Xaml for...
Posted: May 23 2007, 07:15 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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LINQ and all things .NET 3
My thanks must go to Armand for his great talk and demo on Linq and the new language features in .NET 3.0 that drive it in the background. I really learnt a lot and it was great to see working demo where he linked a List<Customer> with a strongly typed database object using an xml document and was able to query all three in one simple query just as if he were doing a regular SQL join. Impressive stuff. This has inspired me to do a deep dive into each of the topics he touched on last night,...
Posted: May 10 2007, 12:31 PM by Ryan CrawCour | with 1 comment(s)
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Forgotten that connection string .... AGAIN?
If you are like me, and work with many different data providers on a daily bassis, I can never remember just how to construct the correct connectionstring for provider X,Y, or Z.... Luckily a fabulous website exists for those like me; www.connectionstrings.com Man, everything from SqlExpress to Text to MySql. Now i can easily connect to any datasource i like; except maybe my mind.... Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
Posted: Sep 13 2006, 08:26 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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Conditional compilation in C#
C# includes a really cool feature called Confitional Methods which when used correctly can be a really good addition to your code ...
Posted: Jul 03 2006, 09:19 AM by Ryan CrawCour | with no comments
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Using the using statement in C#
Tired of nesting your using statements so deeply that you need to run 1600X1200 just to be able to see the start of your code ... well this might be the answer you've been looking for. It was for me!
Posted: Feb 27 2006, 05:22 PM by Ryan CrawCour | with 4 comment(s)
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Voting is now open ...
You nominated them, now go cast your vote for the best of SA.
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