If you are a programmer and have not been living under a rock, you've heard of Ruby. There's been a lot of hype built up around the language recently. Its even more hyped progeny Ruby on Rails highlight the strengths of this dynamic language. A seemingly large number of thought...

The Problem Ok, let's say you want to create an application in ASP.NET. That application should be able to execute .NET code regardless of the path that is requested. You don't want to map the .NET execution to a specific extension and you want handle all requests in a simple...

Version Control, Revision Control or Configuration Management (what ever you choose to call it) is one of those things that often software developers use about rarely do they think about it very much. Version control systems are one of the most useful tools in software development though. Right after the...

Martin Fowler once said “First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects!” This somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment captures the understanding that distributed design is more technically complex than non-distributed designs. Given two solutions that both fulfill a system’s design requirements, I strongly encourage you to pick the least complex....

.NET has had DBNull since the beginning. With the release of .NET 2.0 it has also gained the Nullable type. DBNull is used to represent a null value returned from a database or a dataset. The Nullable type was added to give the ability to have null types for integral...

Safari has just become the first released browers to pass the Acid 2 test. Acid 2 is a complex HTML, CSS and PNG layout that was created to test the standards compliance of browsers for some of the latest Web Standards. The word is that Opera will not be far...

With Java 5 having been out for a while now, I started to think about what might be next for the Java language. I'm not thinking about what might change with JEE (nee J2EE), or the extensions or libraries or anything like that. I'm thinking about the core language itself....

Frank Cohen (founder of PushToTest, who I helped for a while on TestMaker) has been blogging about a system he's calling FastSOA. It's an attempt to help build a more scalable SOA architecture by avoiding the some high cost operations like marshalling XML data into native objects. As I understand...

Visual Studio is known for its WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop user interface creation. But when it comes to actually writing code, it's fairly anemic. Sure it has code completion (Intellisense ™) and syntax highlighting and a few things like that, but it doesn't offer support for more advanced functionality that many people,...

Templating for web pages is a method to separate form from content. Just like HTML and CSS separate form from content, a templating system allows you to further separate the common structure of a page from the "Stuff" that people want to read. Is there a best way to do...