The Ruby Train Goes Choo-Choo
Microsoft MVPs, all aboard!“It’s like we were all reinventing wheels and barrels in .NET land in the past 5 years, when just on the other side of the island, people were beginning to wonder what is the...
View ArticleTFS As Your Build/CI Server: Only Positive Takeaways 2 of 2
I’m unmotivated today at work, partly because I’m switching us from MSTest to NUnit. I’ll be happy again once it’s done, but not until then.With that in mind, I’m ready to give the second half of my...
View ArticleSteal Ideas From These psake Scripts
A warningThis post in its entirety isn’t readable by humans. I’m sorry. I started by picking out a few psake scripts here and there, figuring hey. I’ll pick one or two examples and talk about what...
View ArticleUpgrading Our ClickOnce App From .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0
Fixing the “The customHostSpecified attribute is not supported for Windows Forms applications.” errorThis one’s for the search engines. Sorry folks, none of my recent posts are readable by humans. Too...
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Windows 7 Tool Roundup: Small But Explosive, Just Like Dynamite
Having just lost my previous Windows 7 to what I hope is a freak accident that will never recur, and subsequently having reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch, the list of customizations and programs I...
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Metro and WinRT: Too early to call, but I’m paying close attention
I’ve posted the conclusion below in bullet point form. If you’re a dirty, filthy blog post skimmer, then head on down to the very bottom. I’ll see you there, fellow skimmer.Microsoft has announced a...
View ArticleStandard Disclaimer
Every post I write should come with this standard disclaimer. If I ever re-do my blog, I’ll link to this standard disclaimer from the top of every blog post.This Stuff Just Doesn’t MatterThis stuff,...
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I Hate You, OutDir parameter
tl;dr MSBuild’s OutDir parameter must be of the form: /p:OutDir=C:\folder\with\no\spaces\must\end\with\trailing\slash\…or of the form: /p:OutDir=”C:\folder w spaces\must end w 2 trailing...
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Highway To The Danger Zone
Or, "How to avoid crashing Visual Studio while working with XAML"Our project may have problems. I don't know. What I do know is that, when you open a XAML file in Visual Studio, you are officially in...
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Don't Be Me
This may be good general advice, but today I just mean it in the context of using PowerShell's call operator (the glorious &, AKA "The Ampersand").I could spend a lot of time building up to the...
View ArticleToday, Running a Linux Virtual Machine is Painless
tl;drIf you're considering trying out Ruby, just run Ruby inside of Ubuntu on a VirtualBox VM instead of Ruby on native Windows, because the Ruby/Ubuntu/VirtualBox combo is completely painless. I might...
View ArticleTest-Driven Development
I won’t get preachy about this, I promise.Apparently one of the topics of discussion at Pablo’s Fiesta was whether TDD is a fad.As a kind of response to the question “is TDD a fad”, let me focus on...
View ArticleDon't Sign NDAs
Sometimes when working with the Microsoft stack, you'll be offered information on an "NDA", or non-disclosure, basis. Don't do it.I'm still not sure why Microsoft keeps so much of their product...
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The Discourse Source Code Has Already Helped Me
It took two minutes.While browsing the discourse source code, and more specifically while attempting to load it in Sublime Text 2, I came across their sublime-project file. I'm already aware of these...
View ArticleShiftIt makes window resizing tolerable on a Mac
SummaryDownload ShiftIt, which helps you move/resize windows by assigning global hotkeys. Make sure you get version 1.6.IntroductionI'm using a MacBook Pro on a day-to-day basis. My first (and lasting)...
View ArticleAdopting Agile practices: still a good thing in 2013
SummaryMartin Fowler has written an excellent piece on estimation. Go read it. Inspired by his post, I have a tiny extra point to make: we still need to adopt Agile (whatever that means), even in 2013....
View ArticleThe Houston TechFest 2013 Cometh
The Houston TechFest is coming to the Reliant Center on September 28th. Which, depending on how you feel about it, will be too soon, not soon enough, or met with 100% total indifference. Among the...
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Using Coypu with radio buttons: A tale of woe, suffering, and eventually,...
tl;dr If you’re using Coypu and need to inspect a field to find out which radio button is selected, beware of using browser.FindField(). Instead, use targeted calls to the specific radio button tag...
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True Measure of Productivity, 2013 Edition
Looks like I’m way under my target productivity for the year. Numbers don’t lie.Also as an extra bonus measure, in my 2011 productivity screenshot, you can see that I have a failing build on two...
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