The Tomes Of Experience

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 [...]

The Hollywood principle is a software design methodology that takes its name from the cliché response given to amateurs auditioning in Hollywood: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. It is a useful paradigm that assists in the development of code with high cohesion and low coupling that is easier to debug, maintain and test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Principle

I needed to quickly browse through some web-server logs and pull out the hostnames which were accessing the web-server (to see where people were originating from).
The following single linux command will pull the IP address out of the apache log (for a particular date) and do the reverse DNS lookup for me:
cat access.log | grep [...]

In a stunning display of dick-measuring, FireFox has countered Google’s Chrome browser by claiming New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome’s V8
Give me a break. If this new JS engine in FF was so good, why has noone heard of it until AFTER Chrome was launched? Coincidence? I think not.
And more importantly, even if [...]

This morning at work we had a conundrum - one of our client’s websites was displaying the infamous “This page contains unsecured content” message when you navigate to the secured (HTTPS) version of their website.
In order to work out which parts of the page were making references to unsecured (HTTP) content, I could either start [...]

Well first thing i have to state is that unlike FireFox, the initial download is actually a 500KB downloader which actually gets the full Chrome package off the net. Just how big is the full package? Well Chrome drops itself into the %Program Files\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ directory, and the installer there is about 22MB, so [...]

http://www.google.com/chrome
Downloading and installing it now…
In a way, i’m kind of excited. I hope this represents the start of a short, fast journey to push up the web…The one thing that I *hate* most about web-development is cross-browser incompatibility problems.
Reviews are here

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 [...]