Archive for the ‘Misc. programming’ Category

SQL Server Management Studio 2008 and table re-creation

“Saving changes is not permitted. The changes that you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created.”… What? I was just changing the null constraint on a column, why are you talking about dropping a table?
When it hits you the first time, you’re probably confused. The fix itself is easy: Just open [...]

January 29, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Misc. programming  No Comments

UTF-8 preamble is a problem when you concatenate files

You’re just changing a couple of words in an XML file with Notepad. Your data modifications are guaranteed to be valid by schema. That couldn’t possibly break anything, could it?
<insert the ugly buzzer sound>
It quite likely couldn’t, unless you were editing an XML file that happened to be using UTF-8. Because while Notepad certainly looks [...]

December 21, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: .NET, Misc. programming  4 Comments

Kodu is out, get your kids coding

Microsoft has released Kodu (formerly known as Boku) for Xbox and limited PC distribution. It’s essentially a virtual world development environment for kids. The “programming” is done through logic primitives, which are assembled together through a graphical interface and the Xbox controller.
Long Zheng has some pretty good screenshots, and if you want to see Kodu [...]

July 1, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Misc. programming  No Comments

Getting answers from Experts-Exchange.com

If your search for answers to technical questions yield links to Experts Exchange, you’ll probably find yourself frustrated by the “This answer is only available for Premium Members” blocks. However, it’s good to know that the content really is freely available.
This popped up again today, so it’s worth a heads-up. The whole issue has, of [...]

June 29, 2009   Posted in: Misc. programming  No Comments

Why CS students should do TDD

If you are a Computer Science student, take heed:
When you're about to take on an assignment that takes more than two hours to implement, do Test-Driven Development. (that doesn't mean you couldn't use TDD in smaller assignments if you feel like it)
First of all, what is TDD? It is a philosophy that encourages you to create [...]

October 29, 2006   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed

Refactorability is not an excuse for bad code

According to Wikipedia, "Refactoring is the process of rewriting a computer program or other material to improve its structure or readability, while explicitly preserving its meaning or behavior". Since the agile culture emphasizes refactoring of the code as necessary, it does set a new stage for code quality demands: How relevant is the initial quality of [...]

September 20, 2006   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed

Why writing truly international software is hard

You cannot trust a thing. Forget intuition. As I recently posted, you can't just go about thinking every date value is representable under the current culture. Well, there's a lot more, and I'm learning some of it the hard way. You just cannot assume a case-insensitive comparison between "bit" and "BIT" would be true. "What?" [...]

September 27, 2005   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed

Bound to release or just vanish?

Black hole projects versus teams with proper discipline – which one does your organization belong to?

June 29, 2005   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed

Why OO patterns are not for the weak

The standard mantra for many programming evangelists is "use design patterns, they combine the wisdom of years for you to use" (in case you don't know what patterns are, read the Wikipedia article). Some of my recent adventures into the patterns world have convinced me that while patterns do contain much wisdom, they are not [...]

June 3, 2005   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed

Localizing linked images in Word (and horrible interfaces)

A couple of weeks back, I was struggling with a set of Word documents that had external links to images (equivalent to the HTML img element). I desperately needed to get the image links broken and the binary image data included in the document. There were thousands of documents, so an automated solution was required.
Now, [...]

April 16, 2005   Posted in: Misc. programming  Comments Closed