The Dynamic Programmer

Introducing HTML 5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp is one of those books that I would recommend to any web developer out there. [read more]

Dates are a pain. So I started to put together time traveller to try to alleviate that paint while working on node.js. [read more]

JavaScript has the usual try catch construct. In node, that's not always enought. [read more]

I have been playing with node.js for the last year and half, maybe more, but for the last three weeks I have been doing real work with it. We are developing a new product and we decided to give node a try. These are my findings and my experience so far. [read more]

On how using MVC 3, NuGet, MvcScaffold, EF code first, Git and AppHarbor make me have fun again using the Microsoft stack. [read more]

We put Cucumber in our test, use a capybara to automate the browser and we pickler our stories. [read more]

I'm afraid my notes don't make justice to the presentation. [read more]

A high level introduction to Ruby (IronRuby) and how to use it to enhance your projects in .net. [read more]

Adam Goucher gave a good presentation on the use of Selenium for web automation. These are my notes taken during the session. [read more]

I decided to completely isolate Luca from the HttpRequest object and define my own. The main advantage of this approach is that having a pure javascript object, mocking and stubbing is extremely easy, making testing a breeze. [read more]

As a first simple example of using Luca I wanted to write a simple web service that returns json or plain text. [read more]

I decided that my first Windows Phone 7 application should be a Pomodoro timer. It's a fairly simple thing to do and useful at the same time. [read more]

The JavaScript engine allows for the use of .Net objects inside JavaScript, but I wanted to completelly abstract Luca from anything related to the HttpContext. [read more]

I wanted a very simple framework more like Sinatra than Rails. Something that make very easy to put together some simple Restful websites. And I wanted to use JavaScript to write my code and be able to run it inside .Net and IIS. But first I needed to find my JavaScript engine. [read more]

Today I started to put together a list of books that I will like my team to read. The list started to grow so I have to do some triage. Here is the result. [read more]

This is a very quick post where I highlight my findings on why the new lambda syntax has been introduced on Ruby 1.9 and what are the use cases for it. [read more]

I heard about NSubstitute on episode 26 of Talking Shop down under. It sounded like an interesting framework with some interesting ideas, so I took it for a spin. [read more]

I remember the time when WebMatrix was this tiny little web editor done in .net that the crazy guys like me used to edit their first asp.net pages (without code behind and moving away from classic asp). [read more]

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to assist the first WindyCityDb. A one day, single track conference on databases technologies that are usually grouped under the NoSql umbrella. In general the conference was very good. [read more]

The title kind of tell it all. I started to use pickle now for filling up and managing my test with cucumber. Fill up data, etc. Pickle creates some step definitions for you to make things easy, what it's much appreciated. [read more]

I have been researching node.js and the ecosystem around it. Yes, node has an ecosystem, a very vibrant one if I may say. Today I tried a simple web framework that resembles Ruby's Sinatra by the name of Express. [read more]

Installing node.js First, you need a supported OS, like Linux, Mac or Solaris. I will be doing the install on Ubuntu.Go to the node.js download page download the Gzipped file and extract in a folder of your choice in your disk. [read more]

Some background information. I'm not a complete newbie to Linux. 12 years ago or so, while still doing lots of IT work I used to admin two Red Hat servers. FTP, file sharing, email, proxy and web servers. [read more]

In the previous post on this series we manage to get our Insert and a basic Select methods working. Today we need to implement the mapper class for Post. [read more]

Last Friday I was showing some of the guys at the office how to write user stories with the Gherkin language to been able to use them in either Cucumber or Specflow as executable specifications. [read more]

Yesterday we created our first method in the MongoDbProvider, our implementation of BlogProvider. We created a few supporting classes, but we don't have test for those classes. [read more]

If you use Github (Git) or Bitbucket (Mercurial) you are familiar with the ability to fork a project into your own repository in those sites. [read more]

If you, like me, haven't been able to go to PyCon don't despair. The videos of the sessions are available at blip.tv. [read more]

I recently posted about how to integrate Git with Visual Studio. Of course Git is not the only DVCS out there. Mercurial is another source control system similar to Git that is having more and more relevance. [read more]

I started to use Git seriously 5 months ago when I sign up for my Github account on September 1st 2009. Before that I was a very happy subversion user. One of the things that I really like about Git is the speed. [read more]

Last week I wrote about using cucumber to test your web applications outside in. In the post I showed a simple example (actually comes with cucumber) to open a browser, go to a site and perform some actions. [read more]

On my new project I want to start using end to end testing. The idea is to write an specification run it against an outer interface. Gui, Web service, etc. It fails. So you start implementing the feature using TDD until the Spec pass. [read more]

Probably you are aware of Edgecase Ruby Koans. In case you aren't, let me introduce you to them. [read more]

Since I started using Git a few months ago, and particularly GitHub since last September, my life have been good in DVCS land.I used to be a Subversion user and I was happy*, maybe because I didn't know anything better. [read more]

Kazi Manzur Rashid has a post about registering Areas dynamically after the registration of other routes and the problems this has since the order the routes are registered is very important. [read more]

I try to be pragmatic in my approach to development and one of the things that change the most are the tools I use to deliver software. There are several reasons why I change tools so often. [read more]

The NoSql movement is gaining more and more inertia. A year or two ago I took a look at CouchDb but this time I wanted to try MongoDB. [read more]

Post from the business insider on a real world use of MongoDB. [read more]

Some time ago I heard about the intent of putting together a package manager for .net ala gems or pear. I wasn't aware that this project was actually under way. The name of the project, Horn. [read more]

The other day at the office my boss took a look at our configuration files and he expressed his concern about breaking DRY with all the ConnectionStrings. One for Ado.Net, one for NHibernate, one for our caching db and another for Log4Net. [read more]

Hopefully gone are the days were you considered ok the use of single letter names for your variables or your arguments and you are giving informative names to all the artifacts in your code. [read more]

Gestalt, the new js library release by the MIX Online labs, takes a dependency on jQuery. They use it to do some Dom manipulation (locate tags, modify the Dom). But what happens if you already use prototype.js in your application? [read more]

One new feature in the code editor is the ability to put sticky notes in the code while debugging. This sticky notes are actually attached to a given variable and you can see the actual value of it in the note (similar to using the watch window). [read more]

A few hours ago I saw a Tweet by @shanselman about having Ruby and Python scripts tags in your html pages. [read more]

I have been playing at home for the last few days with different migrations strategies for db development. The one that I like the most so far is Migrator.Net. Here are the things I really like. [read more]

Pronghorn is still a work in progress and the architecture+design is changing very fast. At this moment the main focus is on the ViewEngine because... [read more]

This post have been inspired by the talks about controllerless actions. This is NOT an alternative to that. Controllerless actions is an interesting concept that should be study. Actually Jeffrey Palermo has a concept implementation. [read more]

When creating a Silverlight application that will be used as a widget, you need to make sure that it will work in a cross domain scenario. [read more]

One of the main reasons I got ReSharper originally was for it's ability to do micro code generation. This is a functionality that I found very useful when doing test first development. [read more]

In the context of this article every time I mention Linq I'm actually talking about Linq To Objects. Although Linq has a very handy method on FirstOrDefault<T>. [read more]

If you ever played with some language that have the Tuple type I bet you miss it in .Net. Well 4.0 adds it. Let's see what the ubiquitous Wikipedia have to say about it. [read more]

A very good presentation with lots of code to learn and appreciate some of the niceties of ActiveRecord. [read more]

You can get all the videos (110) [read more]

Common List E-book (free online) Apparently you can also download it from the Apress website's book page but the link was down for maintenance when I tried. [read more]

I want to be positive in this post. So I will just mention this once. The framework is very extensible but It's more difficult that It should. I guess that the problem is not really with the framework, but me trying to make it do something that is not in the spirit of it. [read more]

I have been silent lately because I have been working on a project based on ASP.NET MVC. The idea is to have the bare minimum to create highly configurable sites. [read more]

Some of the detractors of TDD or testing in general is that you waste time writing test instead of writing "useful" code. Well, writing test just save me a few hours of debugging. [read more]

In a previous post I mention about a fix to been able to open a new window both in IE and Firefox using the Lightweight Test Framework. [read more]

This is a quick post. In the samples for the framework the test are written in the same system to test. [read more]

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been playing with the Microsoft Lightweight Test Automation Framework. The Lightweight framework handle alert and confirms without any problem, both in IE and Firefox out of the box. [read more]

I have been playing with the Microsoft Lightweight Test Automation Framework, that's a mouthful for the Microsoft's Web testing framework. [read more]

If you have been following this blog, you probably saw a few posts about what's going on behind closed doors once you submit your code to the mercy of the compiler. [read more]

As you know some types are not nullable like int, decimal, double or DateTime. So if for some reason we need a null int we need to use the nullable types. To define a nullable type we use the question mark notation like this int?, decimal?... [read more]

Today I move the code of LaTrompa.Validation into it's own package, with no external dependencies (besides the framework of course). I added a class to validate XmlNodes. [read more]

First thing first. This is not bad code. This is a drop that is there and the developer make a point to clarify all the problems "he" has with the code at the moment. [read more]

If your team is comprised by more than one developer you should have some coding guidelines and standards in place. (I can make the case to have this guidelines even if you code along but that can be another post). [read more]

I enjoyed this chapters as well, specially chapter 6 and 7 about extending the framework and preparing your site so it scale. Some of the code examples are using a previous (old) version of the framework. I hope they will be updated for the print version. [read more]

I don't remember if I read this on Clean Code or Refactoring or maybe I just hear it somewhere, but It's so true. It's not that you can't change the code and that you can't apply refactoring techniques. [read more]

If you ever wonder what the compiler does to make the auto properties work let's take a look at the code the way Reflector sees it. [read more]

Stefan Tilkov is one of the guys behind the fabulous info.com and is a big REST proponent. The talk is titled REST, an alternative to Web Services. [read more]

In part 1 I talked about using the facade pattern or a wrapper to avoid dependencies to third party libraries. In the second part I talked about taking care of custom exceptions defined in those libraries and how to shield you client code from... [read more]

I try to practice TDD most of the time these days. I don't write new code without a test first. A few years ago write the test first was something that I understood from an intellectual point of view but it sounded impractical. [read more]

In this post I wrote about wrapping log4net (as an example) in your own logging class and define an interface for the log object that better reflects your domain. [read more]

On episode 20 of the Elegant Code Cast Matt Heusser talks about testing in general and the role of QA in an agile team. [read more]

I have been playing with both Ruby and Rails for maybe two years. Never doing anything really "serious", like an external project for a client. I kind of know my way around it when I need it, but I still consider myself a Beginner. [read more]

I just finished a complete re write of my validation framework. This re write was due to feedback received from some of my co workers so I owe to them my thanks. [read more]

You can find this new ORM framework at http-//code.msdn.microsoft.com/XGENOORM. Starting with it is fairly easy. Just add a reference on your project to the very small (32K) dll (only one!) and you can start playing with it. [read more]

The people from Infusion came last Tuesday Jan 13th to present Surface and Surface development. They bring a Surface (device?, table?) and they walk us through some of the things you can do and what you need to develop for the Surface. [read more]

Methods and Tools its a free online magazine [read more]

Herding code on FubuMVC [read more]

If you use Cruise Control.Net you may want to take a look at this project. CC.Net Community PlugIns [read more]

Besides programming against Interfaces and using Dependency Injection to reduce coupling, there is another practice that can/should be used when you consume an external library. [read more]

If you into DSL's (Domain Specific Languages) or are interested on them, take a look at this DSL book, work in progress by Martin Fowler. [read more]

I found this project on CodePlex called xVal. It's Steve Sanderson's take on validation for the ASP.NET MVC framework, more to the point on how to use validation across tiers (validate on the server side, present errors to the client, etc.... [read more]

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Once in a while I like to browse around Codeplex to see what's new and if I found anything interesting. Today I found this Gem of a project called Catharsis. To be able to use it you will need VS 2008 with SP1. [read more]

I was going to write a post about this but my thoughts are exactly the same as Fredrik Normen's. For example, one thing that creeps me out is seen think like this in the Controller. [read more]

Every time I wrote validation this code I think, I should write a library to do this for me. So I went ahead and wrote this simple class. The idea is to use the Introduce Assertion Refactoring in this cases and write this code in this way. ... [read more]

My previous post got me thinking, what are the things I will considered as minimum requirements for me to work in a project even when I have serious constrains on time? [read more]

In my machine at work I can't install ASP.NET MVC (it installs but fails to install the project templates, I don't know why and I haven't had time to look into it). [read more]

Pronounced "Sharp Architecture," this is a solid architectural foundation for rapidly building maintainable web applications leveraging the ASP.NET MVC framework with NHibernate. [read more]

We have been looking forward to implement Kanban for a while and after a few delays we put the board up today. We decided to define our pipeline using five columns. [read more]

On Dec 10 the IronPython team made available the version 2.0 on Codeplex. Go download it now and start playing! ... [read more]

YAGNI or "You ain't gonna need it", is great. It keep people like me to over design systems. Now, every time that I start to write some piece of code I always have that said in mind. You will be surprised how many times I found myself telling me, YAGNI. [read more]

Test your site on multiple versions of IE. [read more]

I consider extension methods one of the most interesting features of the .Net framework. I like it so much because It brings some of the strength of JavaScript into the framework. The possibility of write stuff like this.Have fun!!! [read more]

In the last few days two of my favorite pieces of software released new versions. [read more]

First let me said, thanks for this post.I always sustained that you can't do modern web development without using JavaScript. I never understood when in some user group presentation or a Microsoft product launch somebody drag and drop a control ... [read more]

A few weeks ago Jeffrey Palermo published his notion of an Onion Architecture. The first time I saw it was during his MVC presentation at DevTeach Toronto and I really like it. [read more]

I look at the table of contents and I knew that I have to have it. I ordered two copies right away, one from my team and one for my personal library. The book came two weeks ago and I'm loving it. [read more]

Yesterday I listened to show 115 of Scott Hanselman podcast "Hanselminutes", the title was "Finding passion for Software". [read more]

I was helping a colleague at work to debug an old classic asp script that uploads an image to the server, create some folders if they don't exist and copy the image on those folders.He was having a permissions denied error. [read more]

I was creating for the 10th time today a nant build file from Visual Studio when I came to the realization that I needed to automate the process a bit more. So I created an item template to include build files. You just need to copy this zip file... [read more]

During Scott's Hanselmann presentation on Dynamic Data at the TVBUG he show a little trick that I didn't know about and I want to show it here.It always annoy me that every time you click run in a web application using VS it runs using ... [read more]

Notes on Beth Massi and Scott Hanselmann presentations at the TVBUG. [read more]

Testing is fundamental to get your code into shape and to be sure that what you are doing is behaving as expected. New methodologies like Test Driven Design (TDD) point to that goal. [read more]

Jeffrey Palermo posted about replacing the ViewData on the MVC framework with a generic container called SmartBag. The advantage is that the container will return an object of a given type, so no more casting and also no more using string keys... [read more]

We are changing our template system at work and my boss ask me to look around for a css parser class. The class needed to load a bunch of css files and parse them to be able to get a value from an attribute of a given key. [read more]

I have been working in different companies where the practice of an Agile methodology is in place, but in most of them the part that is always left behind is pair programming and/or code review. [read more]

I have found some controversy in some post in the wild where I demostrate how to extend the string object. Sometimes the controversy is around the examples presented. So I decided to make my own example with methods that I wish were included in the framework. [read more]

I keep searching for the right IDE for my Ruby and Ruby on Rails adventures. I keep changing and playing around with the ones I had and lately I keep using NetBeans 6.0. Yesterday I decide to try again and after looking at The usual suspects, I found Eclipse for Rails... [read more]

The Javascript library Prototype make use of "prototypes" to extend some internal JavaScript objects like the Array. One of the extension methods that I find myself using the most is the each method. [read more]

Microsoft have a set of videos available to learn about the new features on SQL server 2008. You can find links to those videos here. Another set of videos give helpful information on the new features of VS 2008. [read more]

If you are learning Ruby or if you just wander what is all of that about there are a few free online books that you should jump into. Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a free e-book from the guys at infoq.com [read more]

There was something that I wasn't happy with my template system, so I decided to improved it. The algorithm used was wrong, I was checking for all the properties and/or fields of the object instead of check for the variables in the template first... [read more]

Prototype is one of the most popular javascript libraries out there and one of the features I really like is the template implementation. When you create an Ajax application there are multiple opportunities to use templates in the client side. [read more]

They talk about LINQ and the changes needed to support it in c#. There is a very interesting point on Extension methods a feature that fascinate myself and scare me a little bit. It's so cool that I know that we will overuse it at the beginning. [read more]

It's very interesting to notice that 2.0 won't be fully compatible with the previous versions of Rails, I don't have nothing important or too complicated written with Rails so I don't expect to have too much trouble upgrading but I will like to see what is the response of the rails community to this. [read more]

This is a cool example I haven't see before of using LINQ to query and filter an array. I like this use of LINQ, it shows the power of the language and what I think is a much useful "usage"... [read more]

I have been using DooDads, a free, open source ORM architecture for a while now. I like that I can easily use it with any database structure, not matter how bad it is. [read more]

I have been reading a lot about how this framework will better be used in brand new developments. I agree that you won't migrate an existing site to this framework. [read more]

The CTP release of the Microsoft MVC framework is available with the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions. [read more]

Yesterday Scott Gu post again about the MVC framework. Don't miss his post about Passing View data from controllers to view. [read more]

I am an entusiast of Test Driven Development but sometimes I have the problem that is difficult to know how to start testing. The problem usually is, very ambiguous requirements provided by the client. [read more]

In this second part we look at the factory methods to handle the different request and the formatters classes. [read more]

If you haven't look at it, take a look at the Subsonic project, is really cool and can generate a ORM infrastructure faster than any other framework I tried out there. It also provides a cool HTTPHandler to expose those objects. [read more]

I'm working in an application originally programmed in 200 by only one developer. I really clever guy that put in place quiet a bit of base code. The original design of the application is not all that bad, but several waves of developers have done maintenance on it. [read more]

WM 11 and Firefox don't like each other very much. The infamous squishy bug is plaging the web. It's almost imposible to find a custom player around the work as it's suppose to with WM embeded in Firefox. [read more]

I have been playing with the new version of Flex and I'm very impressed with it's possibilities. I did try Flex when it was first released and even when I like it, the price tag and the needs to install an specific server to use it discourage me. [read more]

I really like the Hacks series form O'Reilly, these are very simple references books. They present a problem and a solution in the form of quick articles and they are usually based on common issues for that technology. [read more]