Tips

Here's an interesting problem I encountered recently with a WCF based web service and the humble IList<T> interface.

I'm working on a classic 3-teir system: Client/Application/Database. The Client and Application are using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to interact. For convenience, we have an assembly of Data Transfer Objects (or DTOs) which is shared across both the client and the server.

While working on a recent system enhancement, I encountered an odd error - a NotSupportedException with the message "Collection was of a fixed size".

Following The Good Samaritan Principle, here's a tip for people using PowerBuilder against a SQL Server back end with single-sign-on.

Here’s a strange piece of behaviour – a puzzle (with solution) for you.

Imagine that you’re working with Win.Forms, constructing a resizable layout using a TableLayoutForm as the host.

At Design time, your form looks like this (click to enlarge):

Designtime

But, at run time it looks like this (click to enlarge):

Runtime

I'm working with a large codebase at the moment, trying to write unit tests to ensure that the changes I'm making aren't compromising the existing code.

For some of the code, this is easy. For other pieces, not so much.

One area that I'm finding difficult is in the area of static methods. Historically, I've been a fan of static methods for some scenarios. But, now I'm finding them a bit of a pain.

At this weeks Wellington .NET user group, James asked me how I find stuff - when I need to find out how to get something done, how do I find the information I need. Here's what I told him.

After a recent hardware failure (*) I've been setting up a new LAMP sandbox, this time using Ubuntu 9.04 running in a virtualised environment.

Everything was going fine, but after importing a database backup into MySQL, PhpMyAdmin started misbehaving, giving a White Screen of Death after login. View source revealed an empty file.

Some unit tests on a project were newly failing - I'd done the checkin immediately before the first failure, so it fell to me to sort out the problem.

Here’s a strange piece of behaviour – a puzzle (with a solution) for you.

Imagine that you’re working with Win.Forms, constructing a resizable layout using a TableLayoutForm as the host.

To set a margin guide in Visual Studio requires a minor Registry Hack (*)

First, use RegEdit to go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor.

RegEdit Screenshot

Next, create a new string value "Guides" with value "RGB(128,128,128) 99" (sans quotes). This creates a gray guideline just after the 99th column.

Change RBGB(r,g,b) to change the colour of the guide; you can create multiple guides by separating them with commas at the end.

(*) Usual warnings apply - stuff up your Registry and your machine is hosed. Take precautions.

A recent question on StackOverflow.com asked Why use Monospace fonts in your IDE.

One of the answers referenced the use of Comic Sans as a font for coding. I couldn't quite believe it, so I tried it out - and found that Comic Sans is actually very readable at small font sizes, easy on the eye and very compact. Check this out:

fonts.png

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.

In this post, I show how I've managed to integrate WiX into my NAnt build scripts while retaining consistency of versioning.

I'm working on a couple of minor personal projects at the moment, and I'm using them as an opportunity to try and hone my skills at TDD/BDD style development. Even though I first heard about TDD some years ago, I haven't yet made the breakthrough where it becomes automatic. I guess I'm still at the conscious competence stage of skill acquisition.

As a part of the infrastructure introduced in .NET 3.5 to support the various flavours of LINQ, there are a whole heap of generic extension methods that are available whenever you have IEnumerable<T>.

Two that I've found useful recently are Intersect() and Except() - both of these work to filter values out of the sequence.

A couple of examples are the best way to understand them:

I'm a big believer in the benefits of having dual monitors - in fact, I'm fortunate enough to have dual monitors on both the computers I use most often.

One of the challenges is to make good use of Visual Studio across both monitors. While the Visual Studio IDE is very good at maximizing the usefulness of a single monitor (by having various panes strategicly docked), it doesn't lend itself so well to a dual screen configuration.

Update, August 2010:
The tip detailed here does not work for Visual Studio Express 2010

This one has been bugging me for a while, so I'm very glad to find a fix.

The defaults for Visual Studio Express have the Configuration Manager hidden, I guess on the justifiable basis that most users of VS Express would just be confused by it.

Found an interesting trap when configuring settings for a screensaver I'm working on.