DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by asia

The Future of Programming Languages

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 02:31:16 GMT

In this article I'm going to focus on Dynamic Typing and Metaprogramming in particular. It's interesting to consider what the impact on the maintainability of our code from their increased prominence might be.

Tidying Up Old Blog Entries (Cleaning up MS Office HTML tags)

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:16:33 GMT

Looking back it seems like complete lunacy. For a period of time my method of choice to create blog entries was to write them out in Word 2003 and then export html. The almost unreadable text has been haunting me for a long time and I've finally gone back and fixed them. Along the way I built a small utility for doing this and here it is

Start menu context annoyances

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:31:02 GMT

Dave discusses some options when it comes to a context menu add-on used for finding out what files have a lock on them by team members, etc.

Avoiding the Dangers of Ambiguously Defined Data-Types

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:16:11 GMT

When you are handed a string, integer, or any value type, can you know what it really represents? Can you define the range of appropriate behaviors for that data? Can you tell if it's formatted correctly? The problem is, in all of these cases, you can't...

Late Binding in C# using Dynamic Compilation

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:16:02 GMT

Steve goes through his approach to using reflection, making the code easier to read, making it easier to maintain, discusses the "middle-class multiple inheritance", and provides a zipped project of the AdapterCompiler.

F# at Code Camp 10 In Waltham, MA

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:01:14 GMT

Richard Minerich presented functional programming and concurrency in F# at Code Camp in Massachusetts

VSX Conference

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:31:13 GMT

Lou Franco's recollection of events at the VSX Conference last week. (Visual Studio eXtensibility)

Tidy Things Up

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:16:16 GMT

Ever wanted to have one assembly, but be able to manage your code in separate assemblies?

Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:01:23 GMT

I just spent 5 days tracking down a Heisenbug. Historically, I've tracked down a lot of these but not because I create a lot of them, because I'm good at finding them. In this particular case, I had a set of unit tests that were failing on our build server but did not fail consistently on my machine. This is not a good sign to start with.

How much should I expect my end-user to know?

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:16:12 GMT

From a software support perspective, the question is, how much should I expect my end-user to know? If someone asks me a basic question about our product, then I answer it without hesitation. But what if someone asks me a basic programming question? For example, how to create a for-loop?

How to set up your own free VSLab-based Matlab/Mathematica replacement

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:31:02 GMT

VSLab has just been updated with full support for Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the F# CTP release. It has been a rough couple of weeks for the VSLab team as F# CTP changed a number of things and they have been working hard to put together a compatible release. In this article I talk about a bit about what exactly VSLab is and walk you through creating a free VSLab installation.

Visual Studio Shell 2008: Bringing More .NET Languages into the Fold

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:16:03 GMT

Visual Studio Shell was released in January of 2007 without much fanfare. Even though it's free to download, at the time it was not very useful for most developers as few packages had yet been written for it. Now eight months have gone by and quite a few projects are sporting free Visual Studio interfaces. In this article I discuss Visual Studio Shell itself as well as several of the languages which are currently developing shells.

What if it's not in Environment.SpecialFolder?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:31:02 GMT

The correct way to find the location of system folders not listed in Environment.SpecialFolder.

Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:01:12 GMT

.NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you programmatically manipulate the way your garbage collector acts. This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you through this new property and the different effects of each of it's possible settings.

More F# At Code Camp Hartford

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:16:02 GMT

Rick Minerich writes about CodeCamp in Hartford and his recent F# presentation with slides and code examples

Generic Fiddling

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:01:02 GMT

I spent an hour yesterday playing with generics to get my chops up a little better. After reading Krzystof Cwalina's post on the layout of the generic collections, I came up with this little gem:

Multilingual OCR

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:46:06 GMT

The challenges of accommodating multilingual OCR engines - and what does "multilingual" really mean anyway when it comes to technical implementation?

Managed C++ and IDisposable

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:01:10 GMT

Quick fix for IDisposable compiler error

Visual C++ Compiler Bug Discovered

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:16:03 GMT

This bug exists in the optimizer in VC 2003 and 2005. It does not exist in VC 2008. Code, etc. included.

ompiling, Linking, and Linq-ing

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:31:04 GMT

Thoughts about LINQ vs. flat files

Tips on Creating Portable APIs

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:46:16 GMT

Five tips and hints on creating good portable APIs.

Why Are Our Programs Still Represented by Flat Files?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:31:25 GMT

It's time to leave the secondary, external structure of our programs behind. If you can treat the reflected code from a programming language like an abstract data structure, why can't you just keep the source itself in a similarly abstracted data structure? Isn't the structure of a program more similar to a graph, than a list? Besides the momentum of the past, what is keeping us tied to having our code in this format?

Full-Screening your WebImageViewer

Thu, 29 May 2008 04:01:03 GMT

How to automatically full-screen a browser for viewing images and documents in a browser-based image viewer. Addresses problems specific to IE.

PDF Image Grabber Application

Thu, 29 May 2008 02:31:04 GMT

The PDF Image Grabber allows you to take embedded images out of PDF Files. Simply open the PDF, choose the page, and then choose which image you want. Then click the Save button and pick a filename. The file saved will be the original image in the PDF at its original size. Application and Source Code provided.

iPod Ad Generator

Thu, 29 May 2008 04:46:02 GMT

The iPod Ad Generator creates a silhouette image of you and your friends. Free Windows Application.