Reflection is a hugely useful technology: it allows you to get inside objects and get their intimate details, modify their values and even rewrite part of their code. Today I wanted to build a simple treeview control that would display the hierarchical structure of an arbitrary object by going through its properties and building a... » read more
WordPress is pretty good, but it comes with no code formatting tool, yet colouring facilities. I like the simplicity of dp.SyntaxHighlighter for displaying source code in web pages: it works with major browsers and degrades fairly well. Its particularity is that is does its painting magic on the client side. This can be a drawback... » read more
[XPO][1] is an Object Relational Mapping .Net product from [Developer Express][2], a cool company designing cool tools. It’s a programming component whose job is to abstract access to database while allowing the developer to concentrate on a simple object-oriented interface instead. There is an impedance mismatch between the usual programming technology and the database worlds.... » read more
I was visiting http://www.paraesthesia.com/ for the latest version of a VS Studio add-in and Travis, the owner of the site, had his "Star Trek profile". I suppose most people working in technical fields turn out to be the same...
In a past life, working as a project manager for a manufacturer of railway equipment, I had to deal with detailed specifications and conditions of contract that would be big thick documents of hundred of pages each.
Refactoring code is a necessary thing. Unless you work in some very specific environment where casual refactoring is not allowed (like in some safety-critical applications where the most minute change has to be pondered upon by teams and committees for weeks), you cannot code perfectly on the first shot.
More often, you end-up reviewing code and making it clearer, merging parts that are too similar, removing what turned out not to be useful, cleaning up the names, moving things around, etc... there are dozen of refactoring cases that usually help remove the stink out of it.