cruizer

VirtualBox article

2010-03-04T06:20:00Z

Wow, I haven't updated this blog for quite some time. I'm finding out it's true: Twitter kills blogging. Anyway, my VirtualBox how-to article is out! For those of you who have been hiding under a rock (?), VirtualBox is a freely-available virtualization solution that is now owned by Oracle because of its purchase of Sun. The article is in the LinTech! section of the Philippine Online Chronicles ....(read more)

IronRuby and the DLR slides posted in slideshare

2009-12-21T14:37:00Z

Posted the slides for "IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime" in slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/cruizer/ironruby-and-the-dlr I delivered this talk on Saturday, 19 December 2009 at the Community Technology Update 2009 II event. It's basically the same as the last one (also at the Community Technology Update here in Singapore) except that now IronRuby is in 1.0 RC1 (back then, version 0.5.0 was just released) and the demo used .NET/C# 4.0's dynamic keyword. Good thing that...(read more)

Tip: help IronRuby find SharePoint assemblies

2009-09-25T23:00:00Z

One of the pain points in having IronRuby access SharePoint classes is that you'll have to help IronRuby find the appropriate assemblies. IronRuby (at least with the 0.9.0 version) has an IronRuby folder underneath the lib folder in its main directory tree which you can populate with a "shortcut". To do this, create a file named Microsoft.SharePoint.rb in this IronRuby folder and type in the following: require 'Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken...(read more)

SharePoint + IronRuby

2009-09-25T00:51:00Z

Yesterday I was banging my head against a (virtual) wall because of frustration trying to debug a WF -based workflow for SharePoint when I thought of a cool idea: why not use IronRuby and its REPL console to explore the SharePoint object model ? That would be cool and it would eliminate the need for me to whip out throwaway console programs in C# just for trying things out with the SharePoint object model before I actually code them. In just a few minutes after installing IronRuby 0.9.0 on our development...(read more)

IronRuby presentation slides and demo code

2009-05-24T07:54:00Z

I have posted the presentation slides (in both PowerPoint 2007 and OpenDocument Presentation formats) and demo code here: [EDIT: added link to SlideShare copy] Presentation slides, PowerPoint 2007 format , OpenDocument Presentation format or view online on SlideShare Demo code (zipped) IronRuby is probably not a catchy term or topic, as there were only ten or so attendees...including me and the guy that was raising banners at the back bearing the words "15 minutes" and "5 minutes."...(read more)

IronRuby talk tomorrow!

2009-05-22T02:57:00Z

I will be speaking about IronRuby in tomorrow's Community Technology Update event in Singapore. Good thing that IronRuby 0.5.0 was released yesterday ; that gave me enough time to adjust my presentation to take the new version into account. Nothing's worse than speaking about something that's been obsoleted or deprecated! To those who will be attending, see you tomorrow! I'll be doing my best to present as few slides and as much code as possible. I'll be posting my slides and...(read more)

LINQ and db4o

2009-04-24T07:01:00Z

I failed to mention in my previous post that db4o also supports LINQ for executing queries against an object database. In order to avail of this feature, a reference should be added to the Db4objects.Db4o.Linq.dll and you need to specify " using Db4objects.Db4o.Linq; " in your code. Our previous example made use of a query like this: Student john = db.Query<Student>(s => s.FirstName.Equals("John")).FirstOrDefault(); Some of you might be asking how performant such a query...(read more)

Introduction to Object Databases (using db4o)

2009-04-22T14:12:00Z

For the longest time I have been intrigued by object database management systems ( ODBMS ) and I have been wanting to try it out. Of course there are the usual excuses -- I'm busy, I've got no time, I've got so many other projects, etc. Recently, my wife decided to restart her business, this time in Singapore, and I volunteered to make her some custom software (and earn "pogi" points in the process). I also thought it would be a good opportunity to learn WPF and other "new"...(read more)

Enjoy The Silence

2009-01-15T07:24:00Z

New Year is just around the corner...I mean Chinese New Year ... it's been almost two months since the last TDD blog post! Part 3 is totally overdue. Looks like I enjoyed my Philippine vacation so much, I forgot all about it! Anyway, no more excuses, time to buckle down to work. Expect a new TDD post here in a week or so. We will be looking at using the model-view-presenter (MVP) pattern to make our display logic testable. Stay tuned!...(read more)

TDD Step by Step, Part 2: The Database

2008-11-24T03:37:00Z

Welcome to part two of our series on building a Windows application using test-driven development (TDD). In the previous article we drove the design of our entity classes and data access layer by means of unit tests. The unit tests acted more as specifications for the system rather than tests, since we actually weren’t testing any output from our system. We simply used the tests to illustrate how we want to interact with our data access layer and what properties are exposed for each entity...(read more)

TDD Step by Step, Part 1

2008-11-24T00:37:00Z

In a hot discussion thread in msforums.ph about the value of unit testing and adopting test-driven development (TDD), a suggestion was made to illustrate how TDD is used in creating a simple application, specifically Keith's October code challenge . In response to that, I've decided to write a series of articles showing exactly how this can be done. I guess there's no better way to show the value of TDD than by showing how it's done! I'll be using Visual Studio 2008 for this tutorial...(read more)

Data Access with LINQ

2008-11-03T23:25:00Z

I discussed LINQ (LINQ to objects, XML, then SQL) during the Microsoft TechFEST event here in Singapore, and the slides are here . You can download the sample code as well....(read more)

WCF: Shifting from HTTP to TCP

2008-11-01T07:23:00Z

We've decided to shift our project's WCF services from HTTP to TCP. Why? We've got a few reasons: Performance is important. We all know the TCP-based protocol (used by NetTcpBinding) is faster and has lower latency than the HTTP-based protocol (BasicHttpBinding and WsDualHttpBinding). The system was initially envisioned to have its services available to other platforms (even non-.NET). This meant .NET Remoting was out of the picture, and we had to go with web standards. It turns out that...(read more)

A mind-opening article

2008-10-29T02:19:00Z

From MSDN Magazine: Test Your Security IQ Most C/C++ developers should be able to spot all of the security bugs illustrated in the examples; C# coders would find this very informative....(read more)

Some WCF Gotchas

2008-10-05T02:48:00Z

A project our team (in my employer) has been working on for a good number of months now makes extensive use of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF is nothing really ground-breaking; its significance is that it unifies the various inter-process communication facilities into one common programming interface. Moreover, it is extensible so it can easily be extended to support different protocols and message formats that may come in vogue in the future. We've encountered some WCF gotchas along...(read more)