DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Rickasaurus

The Road to Functional Programming in F#

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:37:04 GMT

In F# there are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the style in which you will perform a computation. So, for our last meeting of the the NYC F# User Group I decided to try and build a general understanding of how the different styles are related to each other through trying them and discussing our results. Come along with us and explore five of different styles of programming in F#.

Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:56:59 GMT

If you have a method with optional parameters, you can never add an overload with additional optional parameters out of fear of causing a compile-time breaking change. And you can never remove an existing overload, as this has always been a runtime breaking change.

VerCache Madness with .NET ActiveX Controls

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:47:54 GMT

About a year ago I was working on building our DotTwain ActiveX control and wrote two articles on some useful tips that I discovered. Since that time, I've seen a problem on a few customer computers where, after upgrading once, the control would never run. Instead, it would just try to reinstall after every page load.

The number one rule of profiling

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:30:52 GMT

"The number one rule of profiling is that the bottleneck is never where you think it is" Jeremy Jarrell, an experienced software developer at Matrix solutions, explains how he was able to work out whether his performance bottleneck was code related, disk related, or database related, using Red Gate's ANTS Performance profiler 6.

The Ted Neward F# Folding Challenge

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:25:20 GMT

My friend, and fellow Professional F# 2.0 author, Ted Neward recently challenged me to a bit of a Code Kata. Take a list of numbers and compress it in a particular simple way but without any mutable state.

posh-git Release v0.1

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:50:42 GMT

Do you use Powershell and Git? Then check out the 0.1 release of posh-git which gives you great powershell and git integration!

Bundler Now Supports Css And .less

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:00:02 GMT

New version of (recently renamed) Bundler combines your javascript or CSS to save on server requests. Also adds support for .less!

Get Started with F# via Higher order IEnumerable<T> extension methods

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:13:21 GMT

The more I use F# the more I want to write my every day production C# code in a functional way. To this end, I've written a few higher order extension methods as the need arose. I wanted to take a moment and share them with you.

Context and Best Practices

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:15:01 GMT

The Right Way versus the Better Way; Default Architectures; Starting Small

Just released System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility Beta - Kazi Manzur Rashid

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:10:32 GMT

Just released System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility Beta I am announcing the beta of System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility. There has been quite a few changes in this release :Added support for PerWebRequest lifetime. Removed the "base" suffix from the abstract class. I am dropping the Autofac. After struggling quite a few days to add PerWebRequest support, I came to the conclusion that adding such support re...

Measuring the Performance of Asynchronous Controllers

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:15:00 GMT

It's easy enough to start using Asynchronous Controllers with ASP.NET MVC 2.0. But how do you know whether it's giving you any benefits? You might be surprised to learn that, in many default scenarios, you won't get any benefit unless you also make some crucial configuration changes. In this blog post you'll see a simple way to load test your asynchronous controllers, and find a rundown of important configuration options that will dramatically affect their behavior.

Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC Don't Serve the Same Master

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMT

Great contrast between ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight and how ASP.NET MVC is primarily code focused whereas Silverlight is primarily tool focused.

PDC09 Keynote: Open Source, Open Platforms and Open Data

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:32:25 GMT

No one was surprised this year at PDC when it was revealed that the theme for the show was to be Azure and cloud computing. What did raise some eyebrows (including my own) was Microsoft's new found attitude towards interoperability with other technologies.

Design Patterns - Which to use When? Take the Quiz!

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:15:00 GMT

I received several questions on how to pick a Design Pattern, which motivated me to write this post. As it was mentioned in the Design Patterns overview article, there is no rule of thumb in selecting a Design Pattern. Developers should not choose a design pattern and design a solution around it. Instead they need to analyze at a higher level, the problem they are attempting to solve and pick a Design Pattern that is most appropriate.

System.Drawing Round-Trip PixelFormat Stability

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:36:26 GMT

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am no fan of the System.Drawing namespace. It's a rush job thinly wrapped layer on top of GDI+. A great deal is only partially implemented and there is quite a lot of undocumented behavior. Today I hope to help a bit with this problem by running some tests on System.Drawing.dll v2.0.50727 and documenting the results.

Thread Pool using Core-Affine Threads

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:05:29 GMT

Article with source code for a ThreadPool replacement which uses the XBox 360's hardware threads (which are only used when threads are assigned to them explicitly). Common problems with manually assigned processor affinity on desktop PCs are highlighted and the author shows a solution that allows the operating system to reschedule threads while still yielding comparable behavior to the explicit affinity model used by the XBox 360.

Fun With Method Missing and C# 4.0

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ruby has a neat feature that allows you to hook into method calls for which the method is not defined. In such cases, Ruby will call a method on your class named method_missing. I showed an example of this using IronRuby a while back when I wrote about monkey patching CLR objects. Typically, this sort of wild chicanery is safely contained within the world of those wild and crazy dynamic language aficionados, far away from the peaceful waters of those who prefer statically typed languages. Until now suckas! (cue heart pounding rock music with a fast beat)

Finally Understanding the Merits of TDD

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:00:07 GMT

I'm not a TDD person...or at least I wasn't until last week. Up until then, I had read the blogs and looked at the examples to try to understand TDD and unit testing (with mocking) in general. Almost all of the examples I was shown demonstrated very basic scenarios that, in most cases, were too trivial to show value. I would ask people who would speak about unit testing in general how you'd do a specific scenario and would get mix responses ranging from "just try it" to "you should be using this tool and it'll just write the tests for you".

Reflecting Code Is Not A Perfect Science

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:45:09 GMT

Interesting when .NET Reflector creates code which executes different from the code written.

12 Must Have Web Developer Bookmarklets

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:15:08 GMT

Here is a great set of 12 bookmarklets that are useful for any web developer on any web browser!

Generic Types and Inheritance

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:30:02 GMT

Although I use Generics extensively, every once in a while it still throws me for a loop when dealing with complex generic parameters and inheritance. In this post I talk about a compilation error I ran into when trying to inherit a generic type including its generic parameters and a way to get around this particular issue.

Visual Studio Tips and Tricks - VIII

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Yet another tips for more productive Visual Studio coding.

SharePoint: The Wild West of Software Development

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:00:02 GMT

Some argue that Microsoft developers lack rigor -- that techniques like unit testing and continuous integration are virtually unheard of in this space. That's rubbish. I would be shocked if the percentage of developers that track code coverage is significantly different for the .Net or Java spaces (not quite mainstream, but respectable). Mind you I'm talking .Net development in general. SharePoint, now that's another story.

Automating .NET and NHibernate Development With IronRuby + Rake

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:15:01 GMT

Using IronRuby to automate .NET development tasks.

C# lambda and foreach variable

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:15:00 GMT

Surprising behavior of lambdas