windows
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windows
Today I am bashing around with nasm again… some useful things I found… Set the current working directory of gvim to the current file path I have found setting the current working directory of gvim to the file location is very useful, especially if you are wanting to use commands in gvim to run your compiled code. It can be done by typing in the following in the command mode in gvim… cd %:p:h Once you have set it, you can use the ! to run commands you would normally run in the dos shell.. e.g. !dir...
After reading this section you should be able to Understand network management and the importance of documentation, baseline measurements, policies, and regulations to assess and maintain a network’s health. Manage a network’s performance using SNMP-based network management software, system and event logs, and traffic-shaping techniques Identify the reasons for and elements of an asset managements system Plan and follow regular hardware and software maintenance routines Fundamentals of Network Management...
Learning Outcomes Explain the advantages of using a large number of registers Discuss the way in which compilers optimize register usage Discuss the evolution of CISC machines Describe the characteristics of RISC architecture Discuss the RISC vs. CISC controversy Describe the way in which RISC and CISC design principles can be combined Instruction Execution Characteristics To understand the the line of reasoning of RISC advocates, we need a brief overview of instruction execution characteristics....
I’m new to vim and to nasm… several months ago I put up a post on how I had discovered a tutorial on VIM and was going to give it a second try – my first attempt failing dismally. At the time my second attempt fell through after about two weeks – I was just to comfortable with Windows and the concept of not having everything menu based was too daunting for me. So when a few weeks ago I decided to give vim a third chance, it was pretty much a “last chance” - if I didn’t see any light at the end of...
If you are new to NASM like me – you might find the following code snippets useful just to get started… (this is targeted to the Windows environment, it may be different in Linux) Printing the number 6 character to the console… the value in the ah register changes to 02h and you mov the message to dl org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main displayCharacter: mov ah,2h int 21h ret main: mov dl,36h call displayCharacter int 20h Printing a string to the console…. the value in the ah register changes to 09h and you...
After reading this chapter you should be able to Identify and explain the functions of the core TCP/IP protocols Explain how the TCP/IP protocols correlate to layers of the OSI model Discuss addressing schemes for TCP/IP in IPv4 and IPv6 Describe the purpose and implementation of DNS and DHCP Identify the well-known ports for key TCP/IP services Describe common Application layer TCP/IP protocols Characteristics of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) TCP/IP is a suite of specialized...
After reading this you should be able to Identify a variety of uses for WANs Explain different WAN topologies, including their advantages and disadvantages Compare the characteristics of WAN technologies, including their switching type, throughput, media, security, and reliability Describe several WAN transmission and connection methods, including PSTN, ISDN, T-carriers, DSL, broadband cable, ATM and SONET Describe multiple methods for remotely connecting to a network WAN Essentials A WAN is a network...
In my quest to improve speed with developing software I have been investigating how to put as much as possible to the keyboard. This has opened a world of shortcuts. Today I thought I would blog about the top 5 shortcuts that I didn’t know about before that I have found useful. These are shortcuts that I haven’t seen to many people use, see how many you know… 1… Selects the Address Bar Alt + D Most useful when you are in a Web Browser and want to change the url address. 2… Move active window to other...
Every now and then I go to Tiobe to see their ratings on the popularity of programming languages. Usually there is nothing exciting out there, just a few small moves of languages so I was interested to see in December Tiobe had a headline of C++ about to be dethroned by C# Looking at the stats, sure enough, according to Tiobe C# is on the verge of taking the number 3 spot. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows 8 hits the market with what seemed to be a revival of C++ during Microsoft’s...
I have been looking into InRule, a business rule management system (BRMS) from InRule Technology, recently and thought I would do an intro blog on it. I have worked with business rule engines before and from past experience have developed my own list of priorities on what I feel are the most important aspects. Here they are… Priority 1 - Reduce the cost of change For me, one of the primary reasons for implementing a business rules engine is because you are expecting change and want to reduce the...
A friend of mine works for a large bank… about a year and a half ago they needed a new system developed for their division. They went through the normal process of using one of the recommended service providers to develop the system and this was their experience, which is still typical with most institutions I know… For the first few months development of the system seemed to be progressing along fine. They had meetings, business analysts put things on paper and the developers nodded their heads...
Today I had an issue with Jenkins where I wanted it to perform a set of tasks, but not worry about the exit code of any of the tasks…. In my instance I was using Jenkins to run DotCover to check the code coverage of a solution and then run a custom application to make sure the coverage was sufficient….The challenge I was facing that for DotCover to generate coverage statistics, it would need to run NUnit. If a test in NUnit failed for some reason, regardless of the the total coverage of the tests...
I have recently been using NDbUnit for integration tests exercising the database. I am new to the tool, so the following exception caused a few hours of scratching my head before I figured out the obvious. Assume you are going through the quick start guide from the website, everything works perfectly. Then I changed to my production database and did the same thing and I get the following error…] DbCommandBuilder.CreateSele... string) failed for tableName = '…. Turns out the name of...
I am not the fastest typist… I know it. Up till about a year ago I was a two finger typist and my two fingers could fly over the keyboard doing all sorts of acrobatics getting me up to a whopping 30 odd words per minute. Not bad for two fingers but barely close to some of my friends who speed away at 90+ words a minute using both hands. So it bugged me…. I mean I would like to consider myself a professional developer and feel that if I will be typing most of days then I should at least be doing it...
Today we had an interesting problem with file copying. We wanted to use xcopy to copy a file from one location to another and rename the copied file but do this impersonating another user. Getting the impersonation to work was fairly simple, however we then had the challenge of getting xcopy to work. The problem was that xcopy kept prompting us with a prompt similar to the following… Does file.xxx specify a file name or directory name on the target (F = file, D = directory)? At which point we needed...
The following sections are covered in the Interaction Design book – the sections in blue are examinable for 2011, the sections in pink are not examinable. A brief example of questions to be expected in the Exam Below are some example questions extracted from previous exam papers and assignments…. I have outlined just the basic section headers, you will need to be able to expand on these… Define Interaction Design (Chapter 1) Interactive Design is the process of designing interactive products to support...
A while back read a book called the “pragmatic programmer”. Great book and I highly recommend – A section in the book was titled “Power Editing” and a suggestion they made was to have one editor. The motivation being that it is better to know one editor very well, and use it for all editing tasks: code, documentations, memos, etc. I buy into this concept – up to this point I work primarily in Visual Studio and do any other text editing in notepad or programmers notepad and while I have been able...
Aims of this Chapter Consider what doing interaction design involves Explain some advantages of involving users in development Explain the main principles of a user-centred approach Ask and provide answers for some important questions about the interaction design process Introduce the idea of a lifecycle model to represent a set of activities and how they are related Describe some lifecycle models from software engineering and HCI and discuss how they relate to the process of ID Present a lifecycle...
Aims of this chapter Describe different kinds of requirements Enable you to identify examples of different kinds of requirements from a simple description Explain how different data gathering techniques may be used during the requirements activity Enable you to develop a scenario, a use case, and an essential use case from a simple description Enable you to perform hierarchical task analysis on a simple description Summary What, How and Why The process works in a cycle.. Why bother? The importance...
Aims of this chapter Explain what expressive interfaces are and the effects they can have on people Outline the nature of user frustration and how to reduce it Describe how technologies can be designed to change people’s attitudes and behaviour Debate the pro’s and con’s of applying anthropomorphism in interaction design Describe the affective aspects used in interface agents and interactive physical toys Present models and frameworks of affect that can be applied to interaction design Enable you...
Aims of Chapter 1 Explain the difference between good and poor interaction design Describe what interaction design is and how it relates to human-computer interaction and other fields Explain what is meant by the user experience and usability Summary Good and Poor Interaction Design The following examples were used to illustrate good and poor design. Voicemail system Remote control A key question for interaction design is how do you optimize the user’s interactions with a system, environment, or...
In the closing keynote at TechEd Africa 2011, Clifford de Wit (Microsoft South Africa) made improvements on his previous years attempt to geekily give away a prize, but unfortunately still got it wrong… here’s why. At Teched 2010 Clifford gave away an amazing prize of a wheel barrow full of tech goodies – if my memory serves me right, it included a laptop, xbox, kinect as well as a whole bunch of other fun stuff – a geeks delight. Unfortunately he was given some flack on how he decided to pick the...
With TechEd Africa starting in two days time I thought I would briefly blog about two useful extensions I use for VS2010 when presenting. They are Presentation Zoom by Chris Granger ZoomEditorMargin by Benjamin Gopp The Presentation Zoom extension creates a global zoom level so that if you zoom a single window, all editor instances will be updated to that zoom level. Before I had this extension I had a few circumstances where I was not aware of the resolution restrictions of the projector until 5...
In the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of familiarising myself with various async patterns in C#. After going through the different approaches one gets a feel for how far we have come since the .Net 1 days. One particular pattern that I was not familiar with implementing but which has been available since the beginning of .Net is what I call the Async Begin / End Pattern. Since my interest is really making calls asynchronously so that I don’t block the UI thread - from what I can tell this...
I have dabbled in async programming in the past but never put any real effort into understanding how things worked. With the new async features in .Net 5 I thought I would give it a look. Here is a quick example of one of the features you can expect in the new framework and how it can make our life easier. The best way to illustrate this is to make a simple WPF application as follows… In the past If we had the following small WPF application with just one window / form… The XAML code for the window...
It has been several months since I originally got my Omnia 7 phone. You can read about my first impressions of the phone – after actually using the device for a few months I have begun to enjoy it, but a few times I felt that I was missing out on something. My biggest gripe on why I felt the device would not gain traction in the South African market was mainly due to market place problems (being South Africa we could not buy apps). The Upgrade Experience Two days ago when a message on my phone popped...
Today we did the marshmallow challenge. For those that are not familiar with this challenge, it is a fun way to get teams to experience simple lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity (that’s what their website says) and I would agree with them. So the exercise works as follows… You are given 20 sticks of spaghetti one yard tape one yard string one marshmallow The purpose Build a structure that is as high as possible with the marshmallow at the top within 18 minutes that does not collapse...
It has been roughly one month since I have started using Git – previous SCM’s were SVN and TFS. One month into using a distributed SCM’s and I am very impressed. A few suggestions to those thinking of migrating or trying it out… Prepare to feel uncomfortable for a while – this goes when changing or trying out anything new – especially when you are comfortable with previous tools, when I moved to Git it felt very foreign at first, especially coming from a Windows paradigm where you are used to everything...
The world of Bash is new to me so for those going through the same experience I thought I would list a few things to save time. Some of these are specific to me, while others may have general use. Useful Commands Open root folder - This opens up windows explorer at the root location. explorer . Create a folder mkdir foldername Get a directory listing ls Execute a script without specifying the .sh file extension Once you have written your script files it can get annoying to have to keep specifying...
I was really excited when I heard Red Gate wanted a review of their memory profiler done. I have been a fan of Red Gate products for years… being first exposed to their products via reflector a few years ago – as someone who has never done memory profiling before, I was also excited to go a bit deeper into .Net memory management. Why Memory Profiler – Isn’t the point of .Net that it manages the memory for you? Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the profiler, you might ask yourself – why use...
Having worked with TFS & SVN for a while now, I recently was put in a position where I had to get up to speed with Git. My only experience with Git up to now was attending a brief presentation on the subject and spending a few hours playing around with it – interesting at the time, but foreign enough for me not to hold any strong opinions on the matter. For the last two weeks I have had to get exposure to Git, and after getting over the initial “uncomfortable” stage I must say that Git is seeming...
So, it took a bit of time to arrive, but 2 weeks ago I received my GWB Influencers shirt in the mail. Perfect timing for my talk at Dev4Devs at Microsoft...
I recently obtained a Samsung Omnia 7 with the WP7 OS. Straight off the bat - let me say how impressed I am with this phone and how easy it is to use. It took about 3 minutes to have all my Gmail and Facebook contacts loaded and merged and be connected to the Wifi. Another huge plus is the Zune software.This absolutely beats the ITunes for Windows software hands down when it comes to podcasts. Other pluses included the screen being so bright and the physical size of the phone which is comfortable...
I have always been slightly confused about the difference between classes and structures in C#. For many years, structures seemed identical to classes, but were simply not as extensible. Recently I had a relook at them and came up with two key identifying features that help me differentiate the two.. Where they are stored Value and Reference values So, the first main difference for me is that structure instances are stored on the stack and class instances are stored on the heap. The second main difference...
I recently acquired a Samsung Omni 7 with the Windows Phone 7 OS installed. With this device I have a new found desire to learn Windows Phone 7 programming and embarked on the endeavour by reading “Programming Windows Phone 7” by Charles Petzold (ISBN 978-0-7356-4335-2). I really enjoyed going through the book. While the one I was reading had a few spelling mistakes in it (not that I am one to point any fingers) I am sure they had been rectified before it went to print (I was reading the free ebook)....
In my quest to read all the books I have lying on my bookshelf I have finally got round to finishing C# Concisely (ISBN 0-321-15418-5). While this book was fairly old, I found it to be quite useful for a student wanting to learn C# for the first time, and a nice way to review and make I hadn’t missed something when I was learning the language. The book is simple and explains the basic concepts in a clean manner, but is really intended for the beginner programmer – it also had a few chapters dedicated...
I have seen the rx demos by Bart De Smet and was blown away by the potential that I think they hold – however I just haven’t had time up till now to have a look at them in any depth. Today I finally set some time aside and got a 10 000 foot view of them. So my plan is for the next few days to develop an application in WPF that makes use of reactive extensions as a dummy project… Today I just wanted to get the basics working, and after going through an very good lab on rx was able to get a very basic...
So, a morning of bashing my head an a new found appreciation for .Net… Today I had to do some legacy app programming in vb6… The issue we were trying to resolve was that we had an application sending emails via the MAPIMessages library. Everything worked fine in Windows XP, but if the user ran the same program in Windows 7 you would get a Runtime error ‘32002’. After a fair amount of searching on the internet I got several conflicting reasons as to why this was “crashing”. To save those other poor...
Ever since I began programming in c++ I have gotten confused with how pointers work. I understand why they are there and why they can be useful, but in my managed world I really don’t like touching them… That being said, tomorrow I am going to be tested on pointers and so I thought I would brush up.. here is a bit of sample code on some basic uses… #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int x = 5; int *y = &x; int *z = y; cout << "x value : " <<...
I have been doing a rushed brush up on my contemporary concepts programming course – only to encounter more design patterns… so as revision I have listed some details below… Today I am going to briefly cover 5 design patterns… namely: Composite Pattern Observer Pattern Serializer Pattern Monostate Pattern Command Pattern What are Design Patterns? (see wiki) In programming we come across problems that are very similar, and certain approaches to solving these problems could be applied time and time...
Below is a summary of notes for the exam. Before these will make sense you will have to go through the study material, so this is more just a quick revision summary. Format for Declaring a Recursive Statement You will be asked to compile a recursive definition for some language. In the textbook examples the language was a number based language, but in all the past exams the language has been a text based language so be careful… You will be asked to state 4 things, Universal Set Generators of Language...
Introduction I don’t do web programming… I have been programming client applications for years and consider myself a WPF/Silverlight developer. The web thing always seemed a bit scary in its stateless environment with limited functionality and cross browser headaches. That was until recently when apparently HTML5 was going to kill Silverlight and I eventually decided that I would need to get educated and up to date. Since that decision I have re-accustomed myself with HTML, CSS & JavaScript....
I had a good laugh this morning when going through a legacy app of a project a friend of mine had developed. I think only a programmer may find this is funny. Random Moo’s...
So, these are a little late, but I was glad to see that Dave put up some of the pics from DevIdols 2010 at TechEd Africa. The winner of the competition was William Brander who did a great presentation. Jayd and myself got runners up titles. Below is a pic of Jayd, Brendon & Myself (wearing my GeeksWithBlogs shirt) after the final...
With MIX2011 starting today I thought it was quite ironic that I have spent the last few days watching MIX2010 (I guess that means I am at least a year behind the world ). One of the presentations that I really enjoyed had very little to do with programming, but I found extremely entertaining and almost immediately useful. It was title “The Art, Technology, and Science of Reading” and was presented by Kevin Larson who works in Microsoft’s Advanced Reading and Technology team. So, if you have the...
I have been busy refactoring a legacy application where there are numerous blocks of code that are identical. To make the code more readable I wrote a sub function that performed the block of code and then I wanted Visual Studio to parse may file and replace any occurrence of that block of code with a new string. Originally I got stuck as it seemed VS2010 only allowed a single line replace, however after a bit of searching I found out that thankfully it does support multiline replace, it is just...
One of the challenges one faces when doing multi language support in WPF is when one has several projects in one solution (i.e. a business layer & ui layer) and you want multi language support. Typically each solution would have a resource file – meaning if you have 3 projects in a solution you will have 3 resource files. For me this isn’t an ideal solution, as you normally want to send the resource files to a translator and the more resource files you have, the more fragmented the dictionary...
The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed...
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 so for those that are interested this might be a great geek party trick to pull out when you want the awe of the younger generation and want to show them what “real” programming is about. But wait, you will have to do it relatively quickly as it seems like DEBUG...
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 – ten years ago – and we never ever got to touch any real assembly code so a lot of what I am looking at today is very new to me. The first thing I did was download NASM compiler. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than...
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...
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 MVP’s. First of all, kudos to them for organizing the event which included a free lunch and flash stick and had some great content for a free event. Secondly, this is not the first time that either of these two MVP’s have organized...
So, while I didn’t get to attend PDC2010, I did get to watch it live at the Microsoft Offices in Johannesburg. It had all the usual things I was expecting, Windows Phone 7 Demo’s, Azure Demo’s and Balmer giving a great pounding impersonation. For me though, the highlight of the whole thing was mention of TFS being made available in the Azure Cloud, with a CTP due early next year. I have been eyeing TFS for a while now but decided against it because of the poor reviews I heard of it in a remote setup....
So, I recently put up a post on using the MMMPack tool to help package old VB6 projects so that they work in Vista and Windows 7. I am a real fan of this tool because it saves me a ton of time.\ Recently though I needed to re-setup my machine to get the whole thing working properly and came across a few little gremlins that come with beta products. So I downloaded the latest MMMPack from their website and when using the tool on my project I got the following error. “Application has failed to start...
So, that time of year has come again when I need to do some changes to legacy apps written in vb6!!!… Except, now I am running windows 7 64 bit. To avoid pain, read the following blog posts which proved handy… Installing vb6 on windows 7 MMMPack Hope this helps someone else in the same position...
Outcomes of the Section (Atomic Sentences) Understand the concept of formal first-order languages Know the syntax of FOL: predicate symbols, individual constants, function symbols. Get acquainted with examples of first-order languages: the blocks language, the language of arithmetic (Logic of Atomic Sentences) Understand logical validity of arguments Know how to show that arguments are valid Understand the basic properties of the identity predicate: reflexivity, principle of the substitutability...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA COS 261C tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Today I managed to start my revision for my Unisa Formal Logic 2nd Year Subject. It has been more than a semester since I did the original work and I have less than 30 days before the actual exam. Below is an outline of the subject material as well as any exam related material for the subject. Outline of Subject There will be 2 sections to the subject… Propositional Logic Quantifiers...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA COS 2144 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Section Outline Widget Categories QMainWindow & QSettings Dialogs Images and Resources Layout of Widgets QActions, QMenus, and QMenuBars QActions, QToolbars, and QActionGroups Regions and QDockWidgets Questions for this Section List six things that QWidgets have in common How can you save and later restore the size, position, and arrangements of widgets for a GUI app? Why would...
It has been some time since I have had an hour or so to do a decent blog post, and finally today I sat down and decided I would just have to make the time. I am itching for some F# programming, but decided to first attempt the 6 Degree’s of Code Challenge that was extended by Garren at the last user group meeting. In essence while Garren never mentioned it specifically, he gave us Euler Problem 3. Since I have already solved the problem in F#, I thought it would be a good idea to do the same thing...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2622 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 14 Describe the difference between user interfaces and system interfaces. Explain why the user interface is the system to the users Discuss the importance of the three principles of user-centred design Describe the historical development of the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) Describe the three metaphors of human-computer interaction Discuss how visibility...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2622 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 13 Describe the differences and similarities between relational and object-oriented database management systems Design relational database schema based on an entity-relationship diagram Design an object database schema based on a class diagram Describe the different architectural models for distributed databases Key Words & Definitions database (DB) – an...
Saw this great little video on F# that Richard Minerich posted on facebook, worth a look…...
In part 1 of Crack .Net Applications I demonstrated how easy it was to reverse engineer an an unprotected .Net application. In this post my aim is to highlight a few techniques that one can employ to protect ones code from this type of hacking. So, my take on software protection is that one can never be 100% protected – given infinite time you can guarantee someone with enough intelligence will be able to bypass all security measures that you ever implement – that being said, we don’t have infinite...
A few months ago I attended a local user group meeting that focussed on software security. The presenter demonstrated several techniques that one could employ to bypass software security and several “tricks of the trade” that one could implement to make ones software more secure. The presentation rekindled the fire I had for a little research project that I had attempted several months earlier on reverse engineering .Net applications but that at the time I had lost interest in after an hour of unsuccessful...
So the first question took sometime, partly because I was getting used to c++ again, and partly because of the way VS2008 works with QT. Anyhow, question 2 was dramatically easier. The Question… Write an application,similar to the one in Section 9.3,but that has four buttons. The first one, labelled Advice,should be connected to a slot that randomly selects a piece of text (such as a fortune cookie) and displays it in the QTextEdit window. The second one, labelled Weather,randomly selects a sentence...
If anyone has been following my blogs lately, they would have noticed that they just had random rumblings of book summaries for my CS degree. This is actually the first semester where I am battling to keep up with the level of work – possibly because up to now the courses have been rather easy to complete the class work (multiple choice), and possibly because work work has gotten extremely busy which has left me with only one day a week (Saturday) to dedicate to learning and doing my assignments....
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA COS 2144 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... This chapter examines the QObject, which is an important class to become familiar with and one from which all Qt Widgets are derived. Questions for this Section What does it mean when object A is the parent of object B? What happens to a QObject when it is reparented? Why is the copy constructor of QObject not public? What is the composite pattern? How can QObject be both composite...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2622 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 12 Explain the different types of objects and layers in a design Develop a sequence diagram for use case realization Develop communication diagrams for detailed design Develop updated design class diagrams Develop multilayer subsystem packages Explain design patterns and recognize various specific patterns Key Words & Definitions use case realization –...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2622 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 11 Explain the purpose and objectives of object-oriented design Develop package diagrams and component diagrams Develop design class diagrams Use CRC cards to define class responsibilities and collaborations Explain the fundamental principles of object-oriented design Key Words & Definitions instantiation – creation of an object based on the template provided...
I admit it… I am a software podcast junkie – it started with Dot Net Rocks, and has progressed till I now listen to more than a dozen podcasts actively, but what I am finding more and more is that the general .Net podcasts seem to all follow the flavour of the month posts… So this week everyone is talking about LightSwitch, last week it was Windows Phone 7, before that Azure… all flavours of the month, all introducing new things, and usually some high level 10000 meter view of a new technology… So...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2622 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 7 Understand the models and processes of defining object-oriented requirements Develop use case diagrams and activity diagrams Develop system sequence diagrams Develop state machine diagrams to model object behaviour Explain how use case descriptions and UML diagrams work together to define functional requirements for the object oriented approach Key Words...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2621 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 6 Explain how the traditional approach and the object oriented approach differ when modelling the details of a use case. List the components of a traditional system and the symbols representing them on a data flow diagram. Describe how data flow diagrams can show the system at various levels of abstraction Develop data flow diagrams, data element definitions,...
So I am not a web developer! I have never been one but Silverlight keeps popping in my head as the next big thing on the Microsoft stack and I would hate to “miss the boat” (I am sure some C developer said that 10 years ago as well). Today I thought I would get a little wet with Silverlight & WCF. Up to now I have been working in WPF so I am not scared of XAML and am surprised to say that I actually enjoy it. I have however never worked with WCF so for me that will be the learning curve. My project...
Any ramblings and blog posts associated with the UNISA ICT 2621 tag should be considered study notes for my lectures... Objectives of Chapter 1 Explain the key role of a system analyst in business. Describe the various types of system and technology an analyst might use. Explain the importance of technical skills, people skills and business skills for an analyst. Explain why ethical behaviour is crucial for a system analyst’s career. Describe various job titles in the field and places of employment...
So today I finally got around to playing a bit more with Silverlight. F# has been taking most of my spare time and I felt I needed to branch out into something different for a day or two… Now, before I go into this post… my disclaimer… I am a Silverlight noob – in fact I have focussed most of my development time at normal applications so the whole internet is a bit of a mystery to me… that being said I had some very definite goals for this posting… Setup my server so that it would work with the services...
I did a recent post on implementing WPF with F#. Today I would like to expand on this posting to give a simple implementation of the MVVM pattern in F#. A good read about this topic can also be found on Dean Chalk’s blog although my example of the pattern is possibly simpler. With the MVVM pattern one typically has 3 segments, the view, viewmodel and model. With the beauty of WPF binding one is able to link the state based viewmodel to the view. In my implementation I have kept the same principles....
I was listening to Dot Net Rocks show #560 about F# and during the podcast Richard Campbell brought up a good point with regards to F# and a GUI. In essence what I understood his point to be was that until one could write an end to end application in F#, it would be a hard sell to developers to take it on. In part I agree with him, while I am beginning to really enjoy learning F#, I can’t but help feel that I would be a lot further into the language if I could do my Windows Forms like I do in C#...
This evening I had the pleasure of reading one of ThomasP’s blog posts on first class events. It was an excellent read, and I thought I would make a brief derivative of his post to explore some of the basics. In Thomas’s post he has a form with an ellipse on it that when he clicks on the ellipse it pops up a message box with the button clicked… awesome. Something that got me on the post though was the code similar to the one below… // React to Mouse Move events on the form let evtMessages = frm.MouseMove...
Going back to my old c++ days at university where we had all our code littered with preprocessor directives - I thought it made the code ugly and could never understand why it was useful. Today though I found a use in my C# application. The scenario – I had made various security levels in my application and tied my XAML to the levels by set by static accessors in code. An example of my XAML code for a Combobox to be enabled would be as follows… <ComboBox IsEnabled="{x:Static security:Security.SecurityC...
Up to now I have been looking at F# for modular solutions, but have never considered writing an end to end application. Today I was wondering how one would even start to write an end to end application and realized that I didn’t even know where the entry point is for an F# application. After browsing MSDN a bit I got a basic example of a F# application with an entry point [<EntryPoint>] let main args = printfn "Arguments passed to function : %A" args // Return 0. This indicates success. 0 Pretty...
So in part one of my posting I covered the real basics of object creation. Today I will hopefully dig a little deeper… My expert F# book brings up an interesting point – properties in F# are just syntactic sugar for method calls. This makes sense… for instance assume I had the following object with the property exposed called Firstname. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Firstname I could extend the Firstname property with the following code and everything would...
In the next few blog posts I am going to explore objects in F#. Up to now, my dabbling in F# has really been a few liners and while I haven’t reached the point where F# is my language of preference – I am already seeing the benefits of the language when solving certain types of programming problems. For me I believe that the F# language will be used in a silo like architecture and that the real benefit of having F# under your belt is so that you can solve problems that F# lends itself towards and...
So the brunt of my my very complex F# code has been done. Now it’s just putting the Silverlight stuff in. The first thing I did was add a new project to my solution. I gave it a name and VS2010 did the rest of the magic in creating the .Web project etc. In this instance because I want to take the MVVM approach and make use of commanding I have decided to make the frontend a Silverlight4 project. I now need move my F# code into a proper Silverlight Library. Warning – when you create the Silverlight...
I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going...
I have been playing around with MSCRM4 lately. It has been interesting going. I had a problem getting the tax to reflect correctly, it was defaulting at zero. Eventually I found a solution after scouring the web for a while... see steps below… Add the following code to OnSave and OnLoad events of quotedetails form with (crmForm.all) { try { var dTax = (baseamount.DataValue - manualdiscountamount.DataVa... *15.5 /100; tax.DataValue = dTax; extendedamount.DataValue = baseamount.DataValue - manualdiscountamount.DataValue...
So… I am a C# coder at heart, but F# is starting to fascinate me. Today I thought I would try and figure out the basics of getting the two languages to talk to each other. From what I could tell on Stack Overflow, at least for now there will not be any Windows Forms / WPF exposed to F# (it is possible, but I am lazy and like VS to do as much as possible). Which leaves me thinking, where will I use F#. I can immediately see a use for it in the Business Layer of my applications – which would mean that...
General Basically, a linked list is a collection of nodes. Each node in the list has two components – a components to store information about that node (i.e. data) and a component to store the next “linked” node. The last node in a linked list indicates that it does not have a “linked” node – usually by a null reference. The address of the first node is stored in a separate location, called the head or first. The code snippet below shows a basic structure of a node declaration in c++. struct nodeType...
Since I got back into programming, I have really been a Microsoft fan boy - our company develops applications solely on the Microsoft stack and we have always felt “well” treated when attending Microsoft sponsored events. In 2008, I and a fellow employee attended our first TechEd, we were blown away with what we saw – we had no idea how behind we were – and since then we have been hooked at attending Microsoft events. So when at the end of 2009 Microsoft announced that for the first time it was planning...