The Tomes Of Experience

Microwave Chocolate Cake In A Mug In 5 Minutes
I don’t normally blog about non-IT related things (although recently i’ve felt that less and less), but food is so much like a second profession to me (the eating part, not the cooking part), that i couldn’t NOT share this link.
i want to try this out now… [...]

World of Warcraft: It’s entirely possible to drop one of your professions, take up enchanting, and be at lvl 275 enchanting (high enough to d/e Outland blues) in one weekend. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise - i did it.
Only downside is that you’ll spend upward of 1200g. I’m sure i could have easily continued [...]

I was writing a mock test yesterday which had some explicit expectations about the number of times a particular member would get called.

When I ran the test outside the debugger, the test would fail as i expected it to (being test-first and all).
When I ran the test inside the debugger, the test would fail for [...]

I’ve seen this now twice in about 30 mins, and its bugging me.
One of the developers i work with is writing code like this:

1: string postingUrl = CmsHttpContext.Current.Posting.Url.ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Whats bugs me with this code is that it shows no understanding or care for defensive programming.
Q1: Why do you assume that
CmsHttpContext.Current
is safe? [...]

The great SQL Performance saga continued today, taking a turn for the….ah…..different…
Facts:

The servers are exhibiting high disk I/O activity.
So much disk activity, that all queries are nearly brought to a grinding halt while the disks are thundering away.
The Query Plans for all I/O intense queries use index seeks - no scanning at all.

This leads me [...]

I’ve been wondering recently whether it’s important to take a purist line or whether to be practical about the way something is developed or the tools we use…In almost all cases, I agree fundamentally with the purist point of view, but i’m a man of practicality, meaning practicality wins out most times….So why then do [...]

OMFG.
I think that just about sums up the Fully LINQified Raytracer….I missed this when it hit the blogosphere back in October last year, but wow i’m just gobsmacked….
I found this while reading about Mono’s 100% compliance with .NET 3.0
I feel so suddenly inadequate in what I do…..

I’ve long been noticing the following errors come up at the end of our NUnit testrun, but never had a chance to look into it in detail until now…They’ve never resulted in a broken build, and they do clearly look like something happening outside the scope of our unit test (even if it was caused [...]

The DateTime.Parse() method (and all its derivatives, i assume) are locale sensitive and will assume that the string you provide it is in the standard ISO date format, or in the format for your locale.
The buggy implementation I found in our system was calling DateTime.Parse() with a value of “23-07-2007″, which threw an exception citing [...]

This evening I wanted to get back to my old habits of creating silly spike projects which just test out a particular piece of functionality/feature.
Tonight I have mixed together some WPF forms and binding with some LINQ queries i was learning.
Part 1 - WPF Forms and Binding
What I wanted to learn from this was to [...]

I posted the following message on a developer list. I’m so frustrated by the lack of alternatives to nCover…..
We’ve been using the free version of NCover in a number of our projects (v1.5.8), and for the most part, we’re happy with what it does.
However we’ve recently come to realise that the free download for nCover [...]

My wife would disagree.

I’m currently in the process of building my source repository at home - after well over a decade of neglect i’m importing everything into SVN and organising my little spike projects from various languages, environments, project, you name it.
In any event, my development machine is a virtualised Windows XP running on a Windows XP host [...]

Well I could tell a lie and say that I knew how to do this, but i dont - so i’ve done a little bit of research and i’m now taking an educated guess as to how I would approach this problem. This might get me disqualified from the comp, but when i was doing [...]

I’ve recently been getting my hands dirty with WPF as a successor to WinForms, and one thing is for sure - its like i’m starting from ground zero, all over again…
What I’ve recently wanted to do was to learn the details of animation in WPF. I’ve read a lot about the animation frameworks built into [...]