• Understanding Domain Specific Languages as Jargon

    Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are the idea of creating syntaxes that model a very specific problem domain. Domain Specific Languages are not a new concept. Some people call them 'little languages'. The Unix world has a bunch of little languages. Grep, awk, sed, lex, and yacc all exhibit features of...

    March 5, 2007 - 4 minute read
  • Groovy Programming Language

    Welcome to the disco era...wait, wrong Groovy. Groovy the programming language is dynamic programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. At a first glance it looks a lot like Ruby, but it's built from the ground up to leverage the JVM. This offers a lot of power as...

    March 3, 2007 - 4 minute read
  • Custom XML Serialization for the .NET Compact Framework

    .NET provides a whole slew of utilities for serializing objects into an XML form. But as I wrote in my previous post, .NET Compact Framework has serious problems with this serialization. The good news is that you can leverage all of the existing Attributes and tricks that you think should...

    February 28, 2007 - 6 minute read
  • .NET Compact Framework Serialization Bugs

    XML Serialization in the .NET Compact Framework seems to be buggy enough that it is generally not useful if you need to serialize a class that conforms to a schema of some sort. If all you need to do is serialize and deserialize representations of a class you are probably...

    February 27, 2007 - 3 minute read
  • Automated Subversion Tagging With MSBuild

    I've written previously about using MSBuild With Nunit as well as a bit of a Manifesto on Relentless Build Automation. I believe that automating the build and deployment process is a necessary step to ensure the reliable delivery of quality software. Release Management One of the things that we as...

    February 23, 2007 - 3 minute read
  • More .NET Compact Framework Woes

    I posted previously on a Bug in the .NET Compact Framework with the XmlEnum Attribute with whitespace in the name. Well I've run into some other interesting "features". The first thing to realize is that the things that work on the Full framework don't work on the Compact Framework. What...

    February 4, 2007 - 4 minute read
  • .NET Makes Me Mad (Generics and Collections edition)

    Ok, so I've decided I need to rant a little bit about .NET. This ends up in part being, "What I like about Java that I don't like about C#". I think this is fair though. It's not like C# and .NET were developed in a vacuum. It's not like...

    February 1, 2007 - 4 minute read
  • 5 Things You Didn't Know About Me

    Well thanks to Dan I've been tagged for 5 things you didn't know about me. So, I'll take a deviation from my normal technical blogging and both of you (rimshot!) some interesting tidbits of information about me. I've never lived anywhere for more than 5 years in my entire life....

    January 25, 2007 - 1 minute read
  • Using SQL Compact Edition Under ASP.NET

    What is SQLCE? SQL Compact Edition is the "low end" version of a SQL database solution from Microsoft. It is a single-file, application managed, database implementation. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of the high end database solutions. This is great when you realize the next lowest...

    January 17, 2007 - 2 minute read
  • Bug In the .NET CompactFramework XmlEnum with Whitespace

    In .NET you can use Attributes to mark up properties in a class to tell the XmlSerializer how to marshal that class to and from XML. There are a number of different attributes you can use. You can use enums for restricted lists of values. E.g: public enum Foo {...

    December 21, 2006 - 4 minute read
  • Welcome Java 6

    With great fanfare, Java 6 was released to the world. Ok, that was a joke. Sun has the ability to make a major release without any fanfare or hullabaloo. Even Spring had a countdown to their 2.0 release. Oh well. Java 5 was the really big release and added a...

    December 13, 2006 - 4 minute read
  • My Foray Into the World of Smartphones

    Ok, so I might be a little behind the times when it comes to mobile phones and SmartPhones. It was a big advance for me when I got one with a color display and MIDI ringtones two years ago. Well, my contract was ending and I've been doing some mobile...

    December 6, 2006 - 5 minute read
  • More On MSBuild

    On the heels of my article on using MSBuild with NUnit, I've been totally outdone by Brennan. Check out his series on MSBuild. He covers Unit testing with NUnit (naturally), but starts with the basics, and gets into everything from Packaging to Web Deployments. All with nice screenshots! He also...

    November 30, 2006 - 1 minute read
  • MSBuild with NUnit

    I've written about Unit Testing and Build Automation in the past, but mostly dealing with Java projects and tools (because I usually write about things I'm working on at the time). Well, I've started a .NET project for the first time in a while so I want to solve some...

    November 28, 2006 - 3 minute read
  • Fake Materialized Views

    In a previous post, I discussed materialized views in Oracle. I wanted to share a relatively simple technique that can be used to create similar functionality in Oracle or another database. Why Use Something Else? Materialized Views are a feature available in Oracle. If you're not using Oracle, then that's...

    November 27, 2006 - 3 minute read
  • Video Conferencing? Look to Apple's iChat and iSight

    At SpiderLogic we have offices in Milwaukee, WI, Madison, WI and Pune, Maharshtra, India. While Milwaukee and Madison are right next door in the global sense, Pune is all the way around the world. Being so distant can make communication challenging of course. When you are in a one-on-one situation,...

    November 16, 2006 - 3 minute read
  • Google Notebook

    I just ran across a new Google product (new to me at least). Google Notebook is a tool that allows you to store notes and snippets on a web page for later use. The Notebook can have multiple notebooks in it for different topics, and section headers within a notebook...

    November 15, 2006 - 2 minute read
  • Pragmatic Project Automation

    In a previous post, I wrote a review of Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion which covers effectively using version control systems on software development projects. This entry covers another book by the Pragmatic Programmers in their Pragmatic Starter Series. Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps...

    November 12, 2006 - 5 minute read
  • Akismet Works For Me

    I wanted to follow up on my previous post about dealing with blog spam. I installed Akismet and it has worked flawlessly. It has caught dozens of blog spam posts so far. I have had no false positives and no false negatives yet (i.e. it has correctly identified every comment)....

    November 10, 2006 - 1 minute read
  • How Do You Deal With Blog Spam?

    I assume that many of my readers are technical people and as such are likely to be bloggers themselves, so I post the question to you: How do you deal with blog spam? I'm currently getting on the order of 30-40 blog spam posts a day. While WordPress does a...

    November 2, 2006 - 2 minute read
  • Ajax with JSON using PHP and DOJO

    Buzzword alert! Buzzword alert! Synergisticly expedite transparent web-readiness! Buzzword alert! Buzzword alert! Ok, now that I've got that out of the way... Ajax is a web application development architecture that resembles more of a client-server architecture than traditional web development. In an Ajax application a client application is delivered to...

    October 30, 2006 - 5 minute read
  • Oracle Materialized Views

    So the existence of Materialized Views might not be news to the Oracle DBAs around the world, but I present topics from the perspective of a software developer. As software developers we often have to use databases with our applications. As a user of a database, I think it is...

    October 29, 2006 - 4 minute read
  • Hibernate Query Translators

    I've recently been doing some performance testing and tuning on an application. It makes use of Hibernate for the data access and ORM and Spring to configure and wire together everything. As I was looking at all of the configuration and came upon the fact that we were using the...

    October 21, 2006 - 1 minute read
  • Firefox 2 Favorite Features

    Firefox 2 is just around the corner. With the recent release of Firefox 2 RC2 I've started using it more. It has a number of new features that you can read about in the release notes. I've already written about JavaScript 1.7 which adds some cool new features for developers....

    October 8, 2006 - 2 minute read
  • RJS Templates for Rails

    I recently got a free copy of RJS Templates for Rails from the Milwaukee Ruby User's Group. O'Reilly has a program that makes books available for free to Users Groups, which is a really nice thing (of course they bank on the word-of-mouth advertising that comes from it. Hi O'Reilly!...

    October 7, 2006 - 3 minute read
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