Recently at work, we’ve really started to embrace TDD (and BDD).  As a team, it helps us write much cleaner, more efficient code.  I’m not going to preach forever about the benefits of TDD.  There are thousands of other blog posts out there beating this topic to death.  One of the ways that we communicate with our databases at work is by using Rob Conery’s ISession interface.  We have an implementation of this interface for Entity Framework 4, and it works beautifully.  However, given that this interface is super generic, it’s less than obvious how you would...

I’ve been toying with some ideas lately for a neat startup.  I know I should probably come out and give more details about it, but I want to keep my lips sealed until I have something more concrete to show for it!  Anyway… I’ve been looking at doing this entire project with Ruby, but part of this project requires me to work with a remote service that uses ZeroC Ice.  I’ve come to find out very quickly, that the Ruby support in ZeroC Ice is pretty lacking, and despite my best efforts, I can’t get them to play nice with each other (if any ZeroC developers would like to share...

Recently at work, I’ve had the pleasure of working on a new project written in ASP.NET MVC2 under .NET 4.0.  Our team has decided to use Entity Framework 4 for data access, and for the most part, we’ve been very pleased with this decision.  One of the things I tend to make use of pretty regularly is default values for columns in SQL server.  In doing this, I’ve encountered a pretty nasty bug in EF4.  Here’s the deal: I have several tables in my application where I add some basic auditing columns, such as CreateDate, CreatedBy, LastUpdatedDate, and LastUpdatedBy. ...

So I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I just couldn’t resist this one.  Here at work, we’re upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 since it’s finally been released, and overall I’m very pleased with the latest and greatest from Microsoft.  During the testing phases I installed the Beta 2 and RC versions of VS2010, and aside from horrible performance in the beta (which was later fixed), I’ve always been relatively happy. Today, however, I came across perhaps one of the most ridiculous design flaws I’ve ever seen.  Anyone that uses Visual Studio will tell you that...

So I’ve finally decided to make the switch to a distributed source control system.  The benefits are well-documented, and I’ve grown weary of Subversion.  After some research, I decided Mercurial would be best for me.  Since I have OCD, and I wanted to push via HTTP to my remote repository, I did some homework and figured out how to get everything running on my VPS.  If you’d like to see how I did it, read on. Step 1:  Prerequisites Since my VPS runs Ubuntu Linux 9.10, there are a few packages to install before we get started.  Run the following command to...

A few weeks back I posted about getting the ruby-debug-ide gem installed in Windows under Ruby 1.8.6.  In that post I outlined how hacking a header file and using the Visual C++ 2008 compiler could be leveraged to get the gem built and installed properly.  Well, after a helpful comment from a reader and watching a few screencasts over on TekPub, I actually found a way to do this with Ruby 1.9.1 from RubyInstaller.org. As you know, I swapped my Windows development environment for Mac OSX, and so far learning Rails has been a great pleasure thanks to Agile Web Development with Rails (Third...

I’ve been stuck for a while now.  There are so many amazing technologies and frameworks out there, and I’ve finally decided to devote some serious time to one of the best (in my opinion) which is Rails.  I know I’ve talked about this in the past, and, frankly, I’ve been either too busy or too lazy to seriously devote time to it.  But this year I’ve decided to make a resolution to seriously learn Rails by rebuilding this blog with it.  I know there are a million blog platforms out there, especially when you consider the fact that every geek seems to write their own. ...

Lately I’ve been trying to find a good development environment for Rails on windows.  I’ve tried several different environments, but so far, I haven’t found that sweet spot, yet.  My latest trial environment is utilizing the new NetBeans version 6.8.  I’ve used NetBeans in the past for PHP projects and I was very happy with it, so I figured if the Rails support was at least as good as the PHP support, it would be a slam dunk.  After installing NetBeans I noticed that it installs it’s own version of ruby (JRuby), which is fine for most people, I’m sure, but I prefer...

As you could probably guess, my blog (and several sites of my friends) are hosted on a lovely Linux VPS provided by Linode.  I honestly can’t say enough nice things about the service and reliability I’ve received from Linode (and no they don’t pay me to speak highly of them!).  But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point is actually quite simple:  My VPS doesn’t have a lot of memory, and I’m always wary of my resource consumption.  A few months ago, I moved from Apache to lighttpd for this reason, alone.  Let’s face it… Apache is a memory hog, and that problem...

A while back I wrote about my experiences installing SQL (and additionally .NET 3.5 SP1) on a Windows Server 2008 VPS.  For various reasons I decided not to keep the VPS server at the time (mostly because of the cost, and the fact that I didn’t really have a strong need for it).  Recently, however, I’ve really begun to ramp up my ASP.NET MVC development work, and it’s blatantly apparent that I need a Windows server full time.  After shopping around for a while, I decided to go back to KickAssVPS.com and see what their packages looked like.  Having ordered my shiny new...