Archive for the ‘programming’ Category

Design Pattern Resources

Posted on April 2nd, 2009 by aaron
Filed under programming | 1 Comment

I’ve had a few people ask me for a recommendation of some resources to learn design patterns. There’s a lot of good stuff “out there”, of course, but my response usually says just three things:
Read pretty much anything this guy writes, Learn SOLID, and lern it güd. I recommend starting here. [...]

Are Twitter Clients the new Hello World app?

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by aaron
Filed under misc, programming | 8 Comments

There’s been a bit of talk on Twitter recently about the various twitter clients that exist, with more being created practically every day. One view was that everybody is trying to create the ultimate twitter client.

Maybe.
Certainly there are a lot of new twitter client apps being made, some with lofty aspirations, but more importantly I [...]

Confessions of a Software Developer*

Posted on January 30th, 2008 by aaron
Filed under programming | 24 Comments

I’m ready to confess. It’s time to lay it all on the table. Ready?
I can’t keep up!
Wow, that was liberating! I think I should start a taxi service for developers.
There is so much going on in the world of software, how can I keep up with it all, while still making progress in my [...]

Refactoring C# with PowerShell

Posted on January 4th, 2008 by aaron
Filed under .net, powershell, programming | 4 Comments

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 have built-in support for refactoring code, including renaming namespaces, classes, variables, and more. Add-ins like Resharper also have support for refactoring by renaming. These tools work great, and have good integration into the Visual Studio IDE, for example being able to preview each change and exclude false positive matches. I [...]

Targeting .NET 2.0 and using C# 3.0 language features

Posted on December 2nd, 2007 by aaron
Filed under programming, tips and tricks | 2 Comments

Did you know you can use most of the new C# 3.0 language features in VS2008 under a project that’s targeted at .NET 2.0? How cool is that? And it makes sense, too, since there’s nothing new for the 2.0 runtime, it’s all compiler magic. I found it by accident – I found Daniel Moth’s [...]

Watermarked edit controls

Posted on December 1st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under programming, ui, windows forms | 7 Comments

Recently I wanted to use a WinForms TextBox with some “watermark text”, but had some trouble finding anything existing on the web. Which was surprising because of how ubiquitous they are. Turns out the terminology varies: cue, prompt, or watermark. And “watermark” is the least used.
Once I got my ducks in a row (by perusing [...]

Cmdlets vs. APIs

Posted on November 24th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under powershell, programming | Comments Off

I’ve been working on a set of Powershell Cmdlets to fully replace the symstore.exe utility that is included with the Debugging Tools for Windows. (To be released as open source when I’m done.) When I think about writing Cmdlets, I tend to think that the best approach is to create an API and then wrap [...]

Having Fun Writing Software

Posted on October 23rd, 2007 by aaron
Filed under humor, programming | 2 Comments

I was exploring symstore.exe with Depends just now and came across a function in dbghelp that’s clearly not in the documentation. I got a nice chuckle out of it.

What sort of “fun” (not nasty!) function names do you tend to create? Or do you keep them all boring plain Jane? (Boooo!!) The way [...]

Proceed with Caution: Strongly Typed Resources Ahead

Posted on October 14th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under programming, tips and tricks | 4 Comments

Visual Studio 2005 made using embedded resources a much more integrated experience than it was in Visual Studio 2003. But what I didn’t know is that there are some important things to be aware of when referencing these resources. A leaky abstraction strikes again!
The Problem
Even though it “seems” like a static resource, accessed via a [...]

TIP: Set breakpoints without source code in Visual Studio 2005

Posted on August 31st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under debugging, programming, tips and tricks | 2 Comments

This was probably my favorite Visual Studio 2005 tip I learned in the Mastering .NET Debugging class I recently took. John Robbins is awesome. This tip lets you set a breakpoint at any arbitrary location – no source code required! Think framework library, or 3rd party library, or any commonly called code (that [...]