Exploration of Thought

Back at the Twin Cities Code Camp I was interviewed by Jason Bock. He decided to post the interview on You Tube. If you want to hear me ramble on for almost 4 minutes you can do so by clicking the picture below. We go over my talk and some of my history of working…

Ohhhhh the dreaded XamlParserException. The exception message is not to helpful at all. In my instance I was working with Silverlight. Namely working with the Prism  V2 Drop #5 from the Composite WPF team. Get the latest and read up the project here. I was loading the TreeView control into my view (Xaml) and when…

I'm doing some Silverlight Development and I ran into a wacky issue (or so it seemed at the time). The Silverlight app would connect to a Java Web Service and get some data (XML). The end result is that this Silverlight app will talk to Java Web Services and the xap file sit on a…

Its kind of last minute but I'll be speaking at the Twin Cities Developers Guild next Tuesday, November 11th. The meeting is located at New Horizons in Edina, MN. The exact address is: 4510 West 77th Street, Suite 210, Edina, MN 55435 Here's a Map: Session Summary: Learn about how the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP),…

For those of you who use GMail mobile (as I do) there is a new version out. Go to http://m.google.com/mail to get it. New Features I'm not looking at the exact features, but these are the ones I noticed right away. Pros Account Switching - This is huge. I have multiple Gmail Accounts. The two…

What is REST? A REST web service is a service that embraces "Representational State Transfer". What does this mean? Lets take a gander at the Wikipedia entry: ... REST strictly refers to a collection of network architecture principles which outline how resources are defined and addressed. The term is often used in a looser sense…

This pertains to non-sp1. If you have SP1 installed there "should" be an option to disable it in the gui. This is from what I've read on the web. I don't have an SP1 machine in front of me so I'm posting this so I can find it later. If it helps you, then hallelujah…

When I present at conferences and consult at clients I often get asked "How can I learn WCF?" It's a great question because WCF in itself is a beast (as is WPF and Silverlight, etc). When I first started with WCF I tried learning via Internet tutorials, browsing the MSDN, looking at magazines, etc. While…

PowerShell profiles are used for loading common scripts, add-in's, functions, etc into the PowerShell session at startup. There are four different locations where profiles are loaded from: You can have four different profiles in Windows PowerShell. The profiles are listed in load order. The most specific profiles have precedence over less specific profiles where they…

Recently I was working with Dependency Replicator and I ran into an issue.     Background The file that is the "dependency" does not exist in the destination yet. Therefore the replicator fails. If it does not find the destination file in the dependent project location it will fail. In English: In $/TeamProject/Main/SharedBinaries/ there was no…

It's an interesting name to say the least. Why the "sharp" symbol? Sometimes newcomers get it incorrect at first (usually people BRAND NEW to programming) and call it "C POUND". It Almost sounds like a hip-hop thing as the "pound" word has different context in that arena. The knocking of fists as a form of…

Integration Testing Purpose: Testing how the layers/tiers/objects integrate with each other. When we're unit testing, we're testing a single unit of code. We're testing to see if an addition operation results in what we expect it to.  Does five plus five equal ten? Does this complex calculation f(x) result in y when x = 5?…