in·ane (ĭn-ān') adj. in·an·er, in·an·est One that lacks sense or substance. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. One of the first signs that code needs to be refactored is that it looks complex. Complex solutions ......

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I was tasked with taking this small project stored in TFS and compiling it for delivery to a stakeholder. It’s really nothing more than a prototype, and I will be building the full-fledged product. Of course, it didn’t compile… when the task is that simple, something is bound to go wrong. In this case, the app.config was just missing. I checked source ......

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Microsoft has released extensions to the XNA Game Studio 3.1 for the Zune HD. The add-on will allow you to take advantage of the Touch APIs and the new Accelerometer. Included in the download are documentation and examples on how to leverage the new APIs.Note: Cross posted from KodefuGuru. Permalink ......

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Reading in a series of blog posts is made easy utilizing classes that came in the .NET Framework 3.5. As long as the feed is in the Atom 1.0 or RSS 2.0 formats, you easily build your own aggregator service. SyndicationFeed feed = null; using (XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(feedUrl)) { feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader); } foreach (SyndicationItem ......

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I had one of those problems that I had trouble resolving with a search engine this past weekend. Once it was pointed out to me what I did wrong, it was really quite simple. Basically, I needed the enter key to fire a function from a certain input textbox. I wrote up a jquery script, and it worked for IE, Chrome, and Safari, but it did not work for Firefox. ......

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Fields… not the kind with green grass and butterflies. Rather, fields that contain the deep dark secrets of a class. You know: member variables. There’s plenty of divergence in naming these pieces of class data. Some developers prefix the field name with an underscore. Some prefer m (meaning member) and an underscore. I personally prefer straight camelCasing. ......

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Registration for PDC 2009 is now open. If you register by September 15th you can save a hundred bucks. Or you could get there my way: win a contest (hey, I’m a poor developer). As I mentioned in a previous article, INETA has a component contest that prizes a trip to PDC. But, it’s not the only one: Microsoft has announced the Code7 Contest - Code the ......

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This is part 3 of a series on KiGG Automation. Code in this article may be dependent on previous entries. Part 1: Automating KiGG Publishing Part 2: KiGG’s Story Summary Part 3: Automating KiGG Submission When you’re first starting a KiGG site and your user base is low, creating a bot can ease the pain of obtaining content. However, in the default install ......

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Looking for something to do this weekend? Looking to master PowerShell? Windows PowerShell MVP Dr. Tobias Weltner has released a free book just for you, Mastering Powershell! This isn’t a little cheatsheet; it’s 567 pages long. Here’s a linked chapter list if you want to jump directly into a topic. Chapter 1. The PowerShell Console Chapter 2. Interactive ......

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When I recently started looking through a certain project’s tests, I was struck by how difficult it was for me to read and understand. The tests were laid out haphazardly, and the code contained enough logic to make me wonder if it would be easier to analyze the functional code. Tests don’t do anyone good if they require that much analysis. In contrast, ......

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A week ago, I posted a few summer contests to partake in during those lazy weekends we all experience (yea right). Since that time, another contest was announced by Silverlight MVP, Page Brooks. This contest is all about building a Silverlight control. The boundaries are rather loose. You can make it practical, you can make it cool, but most importantly ......

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Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz wrote an article for Architect Zone where he makes the claim that CRUD is bad for REST. I couldn’t disagree more, so I felt it important to respond to his criticism. CRUD which stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete, are the four basic database operations. Some of the HTTP verbs, namely POST, GET, PUT and DELETE (there are others ......

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When I set up my first KiGG site, I was surprised to discover that I had to manually publish articles. I assumed it would be an automated process that would run once a day. Since there are times I may not be able to log into my website, I set about figuring out how to automate the process. I should note that during this process, I didn’t use best practices. ......

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I don’t approve of calling a WCF server from SQL Server, but there was a business requirement that had to be met. It concerned regulations regarding the safeguarding of certain data elements. Due to performance issues and the application’s infrastructure, calling the service from the application itself wasn’t an option. Coding the CLR functions were ......

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I never seem to have the time to enter coding competitions. It’s a shame, because they look like a lot of fun! I do usually bookmark these contests just in case I find myself with a free weekend, and I want to share those with the community. It may mean more competition in case I do enter, but it also means more cool community applications that I get ......

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