Category Archives: Code

DRY your CruiseControl.NET Configuration

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Geoff Lane

Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) is one of the principles of good software development. The idea is that there should ideally be one and only one “source of knowledge” for a particular fact or calculation in a system. Basically it comes … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Automation | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

StringBuilder and my Biggest Pet Peeve

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Geoff Lane

What You Should Know About Strings In both Java and .NET (and other languages) String objects are immutable. They don’t change. Period. If you “change” a String, it creates a new String. That includes String concatenation using a + // … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , | 5 Comments

MSBuild Task for PartCover

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Geoff Lane

<![Rant[ I continue to lament the dearth of option for Test Coverage in the .NET world. In the Java world you have open source tools like Emma and Cobertura that are widely used and supported (and many more) as well … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Unit Testing | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Tracking Project Metrics

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Geoff Lane

How do you track the health of your software projects? Ideally you could come up with few, easy to collect metrics and have your Continuous Integration system generate the information and maybe even graph it over time. What we track … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Register and Unregister COM DLL from .NET Code

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Geoff Lane

Background The command regsvr32 is used to register a native, unmanaged code DLL so that it is available via COM. With a registered DLL you can use COM Interop to call that code from .NET Managed code. Regsvr32 is unmanaged … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Code | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Windows Subversion Maintenance Scripts

Posted on November 19, 2008 by Geoff Lane

Previously I wrote about the Subversion Maintenance Scripts that I use for doing things like backups and upgrades. They were bash shell scripts that automated dealing with multiple Subversion repositories. The secret was that those guys were being run using … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Swapping Values Without a Temp Variable

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Geoff Lane

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any C programming (the only C I ever really did was in school 10+ years ago) and I’ve never done it outside of school. I figure since I look at and study … Continue reading →

Posted in C | 1 Comment

Scheme/HtDP Unit Testing Functions

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Geoff Lane

How to Design Programs (HtDP) provides a series of unit testing functions that allow you to test the output of any kind of function. The current version talks about testing your code, but doesn’t offer a lot of guidance into … Continue reading →

Posted in Scheme | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Studying HtDP

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Geoff Lane

I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve recently been studying How to Design Programs (HtDP). It’s really a book about teaching beginners how to program by following a series of recipes that tell you how to identify and solve … Continue reading →

Posted in Scheme | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Grails Testing Acegi Security

Posted on September 1, 2008 by Geoff Lane

Almost every web application I create needs some form of user authentication and authorization. Grails provides a great plugin system that allows you to extend the base framework to provide these kinds of features. My current favorite security plugin for … Continue reading →

Posted in Groovy | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments