I came across Irony (https://github.com/IronyProject/Irony) today while contemplating whether to use antlr or not for a project I’m working on where the requirements call for allowing users to write small conditional instructions. From the project site description: Irony is a...
For a recent prototype, I was tasked with building a solution to allow authors to create “standard text” entries in SharePoint 2010 which could then be re-used by authors. One of the challenges was trying to figure out the best...
The news media has recently been abuzz about about this so-called “Frankenfish“. It’s been puzzling to me what the hullabaloo has been all about. The fact of the matter is that humans have been altering the genetics of just about...
The session is titled “Object Oriented Development and Practices in SharePoint“: Building maintainable solutions on the SharePoint platform can be a challenge (and that might be putting it mildly). Code interspersed with CAML strings, rampant code duplication, hundred (thousand?) line...
Ant Death Spiral (via Cynical-C). This is one of my favorite things about ants — the ant death spiral. Actually, it’s a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following...
Adding this to the category of things-that-I-didn’t-know-but-would-have-made-a-lot-of-stuff-I-previously-wrote-much-more-elegant-and-awesome. You should add it to yours, too! As a quick summary, it’s common knowledge (well, amongst SharePoint developers at least) that you can associate event receivers with a list template type. However, an...
(Alternate title: Failing Productively) I posted some snippets from a recent interview with Fred Brooks in the August issue of Wired (by the way, I’m working through his latest compilation of essays, The Design of Design). I’ll repost the relevant...
About a year ago, I caught on to Dell’s refurbished laptops over at Dell Outlet and since then I’ve purchased a total of three four laptops from there and each one has worked out great. My first purchase was a...
I’ve been working my way through Sahil Malik’s Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 and I’m almost finished now. Just a quick review for anyone working on ramping up on 2010 or considering this book. First, this book...
Brooks is one of my revered writers on the subject of software engineering. The basic lessons in The Mythical Man Month are so obvious and fundamental yet often obscured or forgotten in many of the projects that I’ve worked on....