The Tomes Of Experience

http://brian.genisio.org/2008/11/writing-tests-to-catch-memory-leaks-in.html
keeping for my own reference purposes.

I’m a twitter n00b. I joined up a month or so ago just to try it out, and occasionally i post something technology or work related. Turns out that I joined up right after they disallowed being able to subscribe to your “friends feed” feature without authenticating first. This is naturally a PITA because I [...]

This evening I wanted to wish someone a happy birthday. In my infinate geekdom, I figured writing a tiny app to do it would be a nice way to waste 20 mins this evening. I started off writing in Notepad (because this really isn’t worth opening Visual Studio for), and compiled using CSC jsut to [...]

Tonight’s been a busy night for silly coding
This first post is about a short-cut i’ve created do an instant twitter. Just create a bookmark with the following code (tested only in Chrome), and when you want to tweet, just click the bookmark, type your twitter message and then click “upload”.
Saves having to open [...]

I’m digging deeper into WPF and learning more about XAML, web-XAML and XBAP. This evening i’ve stumbled across a nasty side-effect. When i’m creating an XBAP project in Visual Studio and run it without the debugger, the XBAP gets cached somewhere and any subsequent changes don’t show up - It keeps running the old XBAP [...]

Well if you believe what you read on the wires, this would be probably the country’s greatest step towards a communist state after our somewhat draconian immigration policies.
I’m not a civil libertarian - in fact I get annoyed when the libertarians jump up and down about us losing our rights with this, that, and the [...]

It’s no secret that i’ve had a job on the side for a number of months now tutoring programming at the local university. I won’t get into the gritty details about the experience (at least not yet), but I want to briefly talk about my experience with catching out students who have cheated in their [...]

I have just uncovered a way to perform root priviledge escalation under Windows (tested using Server 2003 SP2)…so easy, with no addons or anything - all you need is a console.

Open up a command prompt (cmd.exe)
Type whoami. This should return your username - lowly peon user.
In the command prompt, enter the following: at <current time [...]

I was recently reading a post about writing non-threadsafe code which talks about the main peril of multi-threading, and one way you can work around it.
I’ve long been a believer that doing anything multi-threaded is fraught with danger and you have to tread incredibly carefully when doing so. I say this with experience. What I [...]

I’ve just read a blog post about why you should pass interfaces instead of concrete classes as arguments to your methods.
I normally try to think about the most appropriate usages of interfaces for my own classes, but what this post alerted me to was the necessity to use interfaces when working with framework classes.
IE: IDictionary [...]

You can use the reserved keyword $exception in the object inspector to get details of any caught exception.
I’d forgotten about this one. Found it when reading about other tricks for tracking down exceptions

Reading an article about unit testing got me thinking about some of the tools i’d love to sink my teeth into.
I’m documenting them here in case i forget.
Backend
NHibernate (ORM)
SQLLite (DB)
Framework
Castle Windsor/Ninject (DI)
Lof4Net (Logging)
LINQ (Language Querying)
Tree Surgeon (Environment setup)
Testing
NUNit (Unit testing)
Rhino.Mocks/Moq (Mocking)
WatIn (UI testing)
Build Integration
Nant (Build tool)
CC.NET (CI server)
UI
WPF (GUI)
ASP.NET MVC /Monorail (Web engine)
PRISM (WPF App [...]

A friend told me this one - I missed the feature of “recently closed tabs” in FireFox - it displays a small menu which lists all tabs closed in chronological order.
Well Chrome doesnt have exactly that, but CTRL-SHIFT-T will re-open the last closed tab. If you repeat the keystroke in sucession, it will re-open the [...]

If you are reading this through an RSS reader, take note - I have changed the URLs for my feeds, and they are not accessible via this website, but through the following URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTomesOfExperience
So just to re-iterate, please update the feed URLs to the new address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTomesOfExperience

Sometimes though when you’re changing interfaces across several projects, you can end up in a stink because a method reference is removed or a signature is changed, and you end up with the following error:
When i build in Visual Studio, in order to save time, I don’t always do a - (Rebuild Solution). instead, i [...]