Category Archives: Programming

Programming Note

As of today, all tech related blog­ging that I do will be done at my new tech/programming/safe-for-work blog, Men­tal Pandic­u­la­tion. I’m doing this for a cou­ple of rea­sons. 1, I really like the cur­rent Theme of this blog but it doesn’t play par­tic­u­larly well with Google syn­tax high­lighter so my tech writ­ing is strangely for­mat­ted. …

June 5, 2009 – 7:50 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Comments (0)

Configuring IUnityContainer

I’m using the IUni­ty­Con­tainer from the Com­pos­ite Appli­ca­tion Guid­ance in my cur­rent Sil­verlight project for Depen­dency Injec­tion and this morn­ing, I came across some­thing that I couldn’t find doc­u­mented any­where. Ini­tially, all my reg­is­tered depen­den­cies were being cre­ated using other depen­den­cies that I had reg­is­tered with the con­tainer. For exam­ple, I had the Cus­tomerOrder­Ser­vice below …

May 28, 2009 – 11:16 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Breaking Up The Team

What would hap­pen if mid­way through the the NFL sea­son last year, the Pitts­burgh Steel­ers, stand­ing at 6 and 2 and lead­ing the AFC North, had decided that their foot­ball sea­son was over and dis­banded the team? Or what if they decided to move Big Ben to the train­ing squad because he was a prime …

May 14, 2009 – 9:05 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged | Comments (3)

Public Service Announcement — Composite Application Guidance

The project I’m cur­rently work­ing on is a Sil­verlight app and I’m in the throes of con­vert­ing it to use the Com­pos­ite Appli­ca­tion Guid­ance frame­work from Microsoft. It’s been a rea­son­ably mind-bending expe­ri­ence but also fairly straight­for­ward if that’s pos­si­ble. How­ever, some­thing popped up today that war­rants men­tion­ing. I’m using the Unity Appli­ca­tion Block as …

May 11, 2009 – 4:22 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Speaking Of Open Source

Post­greSQL is look­ing for a web designer to give their site a new look. From the mail­ing list: To help find a great designer, we’ve decided to put $2000 on the table. The first stage of the project is a design mock-up. A panel of Post­greSQL com­mu­nity mem­bers will act as judges for a $1000 (US) prize! …

May 4, 2009 – 1:17 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Internet/Technology, Programming | Tagged | Comments (0)

Is Agile The New Waterfall

I ran across this pre­sen­ta­tion claim­ing that agile is the new water­fall, that by fol­low­ing some method of agile dog­mat­i­cally, you are merely sub­sti­tut­ing one dogma for another and you have failed to gain any learn­ing or under­stand­ing. While this may very well be true in cer­tain cases, it reminds me of the open­ing line …

April 30, 2009 – 8:52 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged | Comments (3)

Silverlight White Screen Of Death Debugging

If you’re work­ing in Sil­verlight and your app sud­denly starts giv­ing you the white screen of death, chances are there’s some­thing wrong with the markup. Of course, since the white screen of death results in zero excep­tions, some­times it’s hard to track down what the prob­lem is. Enter the Error Con­sole in Fire­fox. If you …

April 27, 2009 – 8:53 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Wireshark Rocks

I love Wire­shark. It’s a net­work pro­to­col ana­lyzer that has saved me count­less hours over the last year or so in debug­ging seri­al­iza­tion and HTTP issues on a vari­ety of projects. Today’s suc­cess story comes cour­tesy of Sil­verlight, WCF and the haz­ards of leav­ing slashes off the end of a URL. I’m work­ing on a project …

April 10, 2009 – 9:44 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Finally, A Real Use For Twitter

The Tweet­ing Cat Door Meet­ing at the col­li­sion of Need Street and Use­less Tech­nol­ogy Avenue. Genius.

April 9, 2009 – 6:32 am | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Comments (2)

Silverlight Gotcha Of The Day

If you have an Item­sCon­trol that is throw­ing an excep­tion telling you the col­lec­tion is read-only when you call Clear() on the Items prop­erty before reset­ting the data bind­ing, try set­ting the ItemsSource prop­erty to null instead.

April 6, 2009 – 3:14 pm | By Scotch Drinker | Posted in Programming | Tagged | Comments (0)