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 …

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 (1)

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 …

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)