September, 2008

Creative Discipline

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 25 Sep 2008 - 6:06pm

Over on 43 Folders, Merlin Mann has posted a thought provoking article Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work

Go read it. I'll wait here.

Merlin has written about a important distinction, one that is critical to all creative endeavours - and I include Software Development as a profoundly creative endeavour.

Fail Loudly

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 23 Sep 2008 - 7:35pm

The premise that systems should "fail fast" is pretty well established - the idea has it's own wikipedia page, and any number of books talk about it as a fundamental premise.

For example, Release It! from the Pragmatic Bookshelf makes several references to Fail Fast in Chapter 5: Stability patterns.

New Zealand TechEd 2008

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 13 Sep 2008 - 11:03pm
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I was lucky enough to attend this years TechEd, in Auckland. My intention was to blog a review of the event as soon as I returned to Wellington, but my head was spinning so much (a combination of information overload and illness) that I decided to give things a week to settle down. So, without further ado, here are my highlights from TechEd New Zealand, 2008 ...

Upgradable MSI installations with WiX

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 12 Sep 2008 - 7:46pm

Download Whitepaper

WiX Techniques
 

I had some interesting challenges when integrating WiX based MSI installer generation into my build scripts. My previous post (NAnt and WiX Versioning) details how I ended up injecting version numbers into the MSI build. In this post, I detail how to ensure that each newly generated installation file will cleanly replace the previous.

Databinding with Lists

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 8 Sep 2008 - 7:43pm

A question came up recently on the NZ dot Net mailing list:

Any one use listbox.DataSource = myList for data binding to a List box?

I cannot refresh the data source "myList". If I use the following code to update the data source:

listbox.DataSource = null;
listbox.DataSource = newList;

The items in the listbox are object types rather than data values.

Can any one tell me how to refresh the data in the list box when binding to the control?

My reply was: