Valuable Reading
Links to articles that I found valuable not so much for their technical content, but more so for the general lessons learned.
Bruce Johnson of Object Sharp writes about a puzzling performance issue that took a little head-scratching to solve. In the end it came down to a data type mismatch between the parameter variable and the field definition. The parameter was nvarchar(40) and the field was defined as char(36). SQL was converting the field values to nvarchar(40) instead of converting the single parameter value to char(36). It makes sense that it would convert the char(36) to nvarchar(40) because converting the other...
Say it isn't so! The Holmdel facility is the birthplace of the cellphone. It was home to the work of several Nobel laureates and was the birthplace of the most important communications technologies in history. And some private real estate company is just going to tear it down. Via Engadget. Before the current facility was erected, Harald Friis' work at Holmdel in 1938 produced one of the first microwave communications and RADAR systems, which was utilized by the US in World War II to defend against...
June 8th, 2006. InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community has launched today, having previously been live in testing mode since May 17th. InfoQ is a new Enterprise Software Development news / information community serving the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities, with content focused for technical architects, team leads and project managers. InfoQ is the only community in the world serving these communities in one place and is also a technological example of what a modern online...
I have signed on as the Editor in Chief of the .NET queue at InfoQ.com. InfoQ (information queue) is a new online community that is currently un-launched (Beta is so played) InfoQ is focussed on change and innovation in enterprise software development. InfoQ is being published by C4Media, a company founded by TheServerSide.com creator and EJB Design Patterns author Floyd Marinescu, Roxanne Beverstein, and Webwork committer Alex Popescu. InfoQ is different from other sites such as The ServerSide in...
I spotted a post by Chris Breisch that pointed to this article in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen. It is the story of Gabriela Ocampo and her battle with, of all things, Algebra. In short: Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she "gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus...
Posts like this are the reason we all love Don. When asked for his opinion on an internal product debate on REST vs SOAP, Don summed up the salient points quite succinctly and then finished up with the following action points: If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP If you want a great experience for LAMP folks, you’ll support POX messages and will provide a non-XSD description of your formats If you want to reach...
I'm gonna say this up front, so that there's no confusion. I'm NOT against open source. I am, however, against it's use in most corporate environments. My strongest argument for this is that there is no one person or organization that you can hold accountable when something goes pear-shaped. There's no “throat to choke”. A recent bug in Subversion, an open source version control system whose mission is to become a compelling alternative to CVS which itself is an alternative to RCS, PRCS,...
I wrote an article on printing to a USB printer from DOS on a stand-alone PC more to document it for my own reference than anything else but it's getting hammered by google searchers. It seems that DOS based programs are far from gone and as printers move away from parallel interfaces to USB people are faced with the problem of how to get it to print. Jonathan just dropped by to say thanks for the tips and left some exellent additional pointers to help out so I thought I would put them up front here...
Over on MSDN Coding4Fun there is an article on beginning DirectX development and they use the old (circa 1980) arcade game Battlezone as the basis for the game. In its time, Battlezone pushed the limits of 3D graphical processing. So much so that the environment was rendered in wire-frame. It is generally considered the first true virtual reality game. These days, you could run it on your phone. Now, the sample tutorial suggests you use C# Express which targets the 2.0 Framework but they use the...
Matthew Cassell, at 15 years old, is the youngest member of my user group here in Kitchener. He's also one of the most active. He's recently put together a podcast that will focus on .NET development as it relates to the academic space. High school in particular. Don't let the audience demographic fool you. Matt has some great stuff already in the can, as it were, including an interview with Java/.NET congnoscente Ted Neward and Mono project caballero César López Natarén. You can download...
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