I’ve been doing some work with Linux lately, a new thing for me, and feel a bit like I’ve been thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Today I updated Python to version 2.7 on an EC2 instance.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always considered batch files as kind of ghetto. Anything too complex devolves into a morass of gotos and labels. But I recently put together some install batch scripts that I was actually pleased with, including a clean mechanism for sharing common code.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think Visual Studio’s static analysis warning for checking parameters for null before they are used is generally a good idea, but the code to check the parameters can get really tedious.

Read the rest of this entry »

My son turns 14 this month, but we still have bedtime stories. Currently, the bedtime story is Simon Singh’s The Code Book. While reading the description of the Vigenére cipher, I started to think about how I’d code up an implementation, and that led to my first webOS application. Cipher Suite is a small collection of classic ciphers, and is currently in the Palm beta feed. Hopefully a few people will give it a try and let me know if it sets their phone on fire or drowns some kittens or anything. Having gotten it that far, I thought I’d share a little bit about how the app was developed.
Read the rest of this entry »

Easy control transparency isn’t exactly a hallmark of Windows Forms. If you have a form with a background image or a gradient, the stock controls paint with a solid background to give a criminally egregious aesthetic.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are lots of examples that demonstrate how to draw a rectangle with rounded corners using GDI+ in .NET. Converting such a rectangle to a Region so that it can be filled or be used for the geometry of a window can have less than perfect results, though.
Read the rest of this entry »

The official Silverlight documentation about localization gives lots of information about working with resource files, but it is kind of scant on how to actually get localized strings to show up in the UI in a reasonable way. For example, an unreasonable way would be to set the text/content properties of all the controls in a page’s code-behind file. A reasonable way is to use data binding.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago I wrote about an approach to improving .NET cold startup performance. Here’s a little more information that I’ve learned since then.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading Jeffrey Richter’s book CLR via C# right now. I was kind of surprised to read this statement by the author: “If I had been involved in the design of the .NET Framework and compilers, I would not have offered properties at all…” (p. 218) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Richter’s CLR via C# lately, and just read a section titled “Declaring a Method’s Parameter Types”. That title doesn’t exactly promise a riveting read, but it did a nice job of articulating some guidelines for method parameter and return types, independent of any particular programming language.

Read the rest of this entry »