August 2006 Entries

I know that there are a number of different teams here in Edmonton using SCRUM to one degree or another.  Starting today things get different here.  Tell me your team could survive this daily scrum.  Edmonton is playing host to the Women's Rugby World Cup from August 30th to September 17th.  This will be an awesome tourney and I hope they get great crowds out for all the matches.  Edmonton also plays host to the Churchill Cup, a yearly tourney with some great international mens and womens squads.  I've heard rumors that Commonwealth Stadium will be changing...

For the first time in a long time today I had a build fail on our automated build machine.  So to start investigating the error I fired up the Cruise Control .NET Dashboard and found this lovely error greeting me. After some searching on the internet I was able to determine that there is a difference in the data type used by the Ticks property in .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. This is what causes the problems with CCNet.  The solution was to open the ccnet.exe.config and ccservice.exe.config files and change the startup blocks to have the...

Last night I presented at Edmug on Code Generation using myGeneration.  We covered off a basic Business/Domain object creation script and then added some inheritance, interfaces and code retention to it.  Most of the concepts that I wanted to discuss have already been posted on my blog here.  I've also added the following content for download PowerPoint (pretty boring actually) Finished myGeneration script (includes a couple of extra goodies -- see below) Pascal and camel casing functions that I wrote for the demo The extra goodies now.  Last night I wanted to show the ease of...

I read Software by Rob's article on Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers and I was really intrigued by the Pessimistic trait.  Rob (I'm assuming that this is the writer's name) contends that pessimism is a great trait for software developers, but you have to read the section on pessimism carefully to get a good appreciation of what Rob is trying to say. Pessimism is good as an initial reaction to a situation.  At some point optimism must take over from pessimism though.  Originally this post was going to be an argument that there were actually three favourable phases...

After some trials and tribulations I have managed to get a post written from Windows Live Writer.  Kudos to the MS folks who have worked on this because, for a beta product, the install/uninstall process works very well (three times I tried it).  In the end the problems I was having were not because of the installation, but rather the configuration that you are prompted for when you first run the application.  At one point you are prompted for the url for the metablog API.  I was entering my URL with the full www.igloocoder.com name in it and I would...

I've been working with myGeneration quite a bit lately as I prepare for my presentation at Edmug on the 24th of August. As part of the research I've been doing while creating the presentation material I've been working on creating a template for generating a data access layer in the format that I like. While doing this I've been trying to figure out how to best work with customizations to the generated code.So far I've been looking at two different ways of handling custom code. The first is to use the preserve method provided by myGeneration and...

On Thursday, September 7th Edmug and MSDN Canada will be holding an evening of fun, laughter and Atlas with John 'The Pimp' Bristowe. Registration for the event is required and can be done here. Sign up soon as there are a limited number of seats available for this event.

Anyone who knows me well understands that I have a passion for both eating and cooking food. Yesterday I made up a great summer dinner that I thought I'd share it here.Corn on the Cob:  I used Taber Corn for this, but any corn will do as long as it has the husks still on it. Pull the husks back (but don't separate from the cob), exposing the cob and the silk. Remove the silk and 're-package' the cob with the husks. Soak in water for and hour or so to get the husks moist and prevent...

For all you folks that attended Jean-Luc David's presentation on Atlas at Edmug in June, join me in congratulating JLD on his recent appointment to Microsoft Canada as it's newest Developer Evangelist. Having him in this role will help the developer community in Canada a lot.

Right now at work I'm fighting with a situation where I have to rebuild a testing environment consisting of 6 servers, a complete Active Directory installation (one of the servers is a domain controller) and the installation of some software that extends Active Directory and provides web based domain security. For a networking person this might not seem like a lot, but for me this is a huge amount of work, not to mention the stretching of my skillset (and I have worked as a network admin before), that has been added to the stack of development tasks that...

All right folks. You've heard the rumours. You've seen the East Block and Sesame Street versions of the posters (and the mockings from people who feel left out). People are massing in the streets in queues to get a chair in a session. Well, it's official folks! Edmonton Code Camp registration is now open! You can register and select your sessions at registration.edmontoncodecamp.com. The line up looks great and is anchored by a stellar pairing immediately following lunch. This will undoubtedly be the biggest developer event in Edmonton since the...

A couple of weeks ago I started getting a number of comments per day as spam. For some reason Community Server wasn't trapping them as spam so I was manually deleting every one of them. Thankfully there were only a couple to five per day so it was quite manageable, but nonetheless frustrating. After some searching on the web I managed to find ReverseDOS from AngryPets.com. I implemented ReverseDOS last week and, after one minor tweak to ensure that a specific enhancement drug was on the blacklist, I've been comment spam free. It's pretty damn...

I've been looking for an Alt-Tab replacement for some time. There are a number of them out there, but I've never heard multiple people give glowing recommendations to one item. Between that and the fact I'm cheap I haven't used any of them yet. Today I took the plunge and downloaded a free tool from Microsoft called, interestingly enough, Alt-Tab Replacement. It's a WinXP only tool apparently so it does have some limitations. It might not be the most beautiful tool out their either, but it's doing exactly what I was looking for and it's...

So it's 5am on a Friday morning and I've been unable to sleep, so rather than lying in bed and thinking about code generation I figured I should get up and write about it. I know what your thinking, but really it's not *that* blatantly obvious why I was lying in bed alone. Instead I blame it on the fact that googling my name just isn't as productive for me as it is for some people.What I've been thinking about this morning is what requirements do I have for a code generation tool. About 4 years ago...

I've been working quite a bit in the last week with some code generation tools as I prepare to do a presentation for Edmug. I think that I've finally settled on using myGeneration for the presentation, primarily because it's free and everyone can download it and my presentation templates after the event. One of the items that I want to discuss during the presentation is the reasons for using code generation. So far I've come up with the following list, but I'm interested in hearing from people what other benefits that they see from utilizing code generation...

You don't have to truly know Justice to understand that the title of this post is not some kind of fantasy statement. The amazing thing is that the picture of Justice (see below) for Edmonton Code Camp is one of his better hair days.I also never realized that Justice looked so darn good in green. It really is your color man. And the poker face in this picture is priceless. No more darting eyes for tells, heck no more eyes. And dude, the comb-over is a quantum leap over your tussled (I know for a...