March, 2011
01 March 2011
For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut...
February, 2011
23 February 2011
The Past
15 February 2011
Today I thought I would go back in time and have a look at the DEBUG command that has been available since the beginning of dawn in DOS, MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. up to today I always knew it was there, but had no clue on how to use it...
15 February 2011
Absolutely loved this book. The Art of Unit Testing is one of those books that every chapter you read you relate to and every example in the book is easy to understand and applicable. This book is now on my top 10 list of important books a professional .Net developer...
12 February 2011
Today I got to play with NASM. This is an assembler and disassembler that can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit & 64-bit programs. Let me say upfront that the last time I looked at assembly code at any depth was when I was studying Computer Science in Pietermaritzburg –...
10 February 2011
So this is a totally selfish post. I continually forget how to setup my 3g modem in South Africa and it takes forever to get in touch with someone on their helpline, so I eventually recorded on youtube for future reference.
07 February 2011
Recently I read a post by someone who felt the Microsoft MVP program had failed. My local experience with the MVP program would tend for me to disagree. On Saturday I attended a free Windows Phone 7 event organized by Robert MacLean and Rudi Grobler both of whom are local...
January, 2011
31 January 2011
Today I thought I would write a bit about delegates in C#. Up till recently I have managed to side step any real understanding of what delegates do and why they are useful – I mean, I know roughly what they do and have used them a lot, but I...
31 January 2011
Today I can finally say that I finished both of my Bill Gates books that had been lying on the shelf for several years. The books were…
25 January 2011
Yes, coding in its general sense is extremely easy, and it is getting easier by the day. So easy that a small child can rattle off some code and end up with something that works. In fact, for many years there I was in my little bubble with the IDE...
07 January 2011
So I love this example that I saw in one of my daily programming newsletters – F# interactive in the browser – no need for VS.
07 January 2011
A while back I purchased a RFID scanner that could be connected to a PC and programmed via VS. It was a fun purchase an though the import duties nailed me, I was glad to get the little gadget.
06 January 2011
Today I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out what I had had done wrong. I had an application that when the user click’s “exit”, it should prompt if they want to save the last unsaved file, or cancel the exit. If the select cancel it...
05 January 2011
We have been using LogicNP’s CryptoLicensing for some of our software and I was battling to understand how exactly the whole process worked. I was sent the following document which really helped explain it – so if you ever use the same tool it is well worth a read.
03 January 2011
So, I have been pretty quiet for the last month or so. True, it has been holiday time and I went to Cape Town for a stunning week of sunshine and blue skies, but the second I got back home I spent the remainder of my holiday on my pc...
02 January 2011
This is a great book on Dependency Injection. It covered several aspects of DI that I was not aware of. What I really enjoyed about this book was that it had a great balance between being technical and readable. A must read for someone wanting to implement loosely coupled code...
December, 2010
14 December 2010
So, I attended the Microsoft Community Evening. The attendance was better than I was expecting for December and we had our first Programming Languages Meeting where Gary did a great presentation on an intro to Ruby.
November, 2010
27 November 2010
You get these days when you just wonder what on earth you were thinking – I had one recently. I have been looking for a fanless power supply and after scouring the net eventually came across a local site that was advertising a ReadyNas Fanless PSU.
24 November 2010
Another nifty little feature in C# is anonymous types. Anonymous types allow a “short cut” in creating an object with a set of properties. They seem to be used mainly in LINQ, however we will make up a scenario here.
23 November 2010
This evening I thought I would look into something that I have been meaning to look into for a while, but just haven’t given the time of day. Initially I wanted to brush up on some LINQ, but after going over the definition of LINQ, I stumbled across extension methods…...
