Jake Hackl » Tech

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery – Smashing Magazine

Jake Hackl — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:40:44 +0000

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery – Smashing Magazine. Found this from http://jeremy.zawodny.com/linkblog/

When you REALLY need testing

Jake Hackl — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:48:35 +0000

I came across an job posting today from the mailing list for my software engineering master’s program at the U of M that showed when you really need testing. I use TDD practices and more and more BDD but I don’t use them everywhere and all the time. To some I am a bad, bad, bad developer and my response is to say come back to reality, buy me lunch, and I’ll hear you out. In theory testing everything is awesome and in theory shipping on time is awesome and in theory testing is more effective and efficient to a project in the long run. But like all rules there are exceptions. I used to keep a business quote years ago on my computer; it is gone now but it went something like “In business, it is always never and never always”. I think I’ve misremembered the quote but I like the idea.

When you have client work that you’ve been cranking on for 5 years or more like I do or ASP.NET sites that are still chugging away after years you know it is not realistic to go back and introduce testing so you have better code coverage, it is just impractical. With legacy systems, one ends up with testing procedures that are outside of the model and normal testing frameworks. Whether it be custom SQL scripts you’ve written to ensure the order totals or that deliveries are made or if its the smell tests you’ve experienced from creating, modifying, and maintaining a codebase for an extended period of time, these are your tests. Obviously that doesn’t extend well and when you have to train in people on the processes that is when the introduction of testing to the code can offer great benefit. Not only will you have the coverage but it also helps anchor the students understanding by having them write the tests and introduce them.

And then there are the cases I have with my current client who has a great business model that is hampered by a less than optimal ASP.NET design. Sure, it has tiers/layers, repositories, some design patterns, broken out classes for every type of functionality possible with the web and internal systems. It has custom exceptions, extenders, modifiers, AJAX of many flavors; yes, it has some cool stuff. But it doesn’t have a central vision and you can tell that multiple outfits have hammered on the codebase because over here a cost is performed this way and over there another. So the design and structure quickly turned to spaghetti with Ragu and I’m in there to uncook the noodles and put them back in the box. But I don’t see how I can add testing to this asp.net site and still get this ship out of the harbor before the school season. And you could say that if the outfits had used testing they wouldn’t be in the place and perhaps that is true; but it is also true that if they followed one vision the project would be better off as well.

Now, if I could rewrite everything using MVC then I’d have coverage all over the place. In honor of NFL training camp I’ll say I’d have a 110% coverage and take it day by day. And before I forget! The job posting that triggered this thought.

A former MSSE graduate, contacted me about software testing positions that he is trying to fill at . Their technology controls those flashing white lights at intersections that signal the approach of emergency vehicles.

Um, that is a project that needs testing.

Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Posters

Jake Hackl — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:52:54 +0000

Microsoft published keybinding (in other words shortcuts) for Visual Studio 2010 last week as ScottGu blogged about. I downloaded my letter-size low-res copy for C# and as I looked at it I chuckled a bit because I remembered when those keystrokes meant other things in the COM and VB6 days WHICH then made me think how Microsoft Office did such a great job of reusing its keybindings over the years. As a matter of fact when I use excel for data scrubbing or templating soem batch file or powershell commands Excel will basically tell me “Tsk, tsk; these days we don’t use that keybinding but for you I’ll still perform the functionality” To which I say, “Cool, why change”.

Download details: Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Posters.

My personal reference point:

VS-KB-Brochure-CSharp-Letter

Post calls with REST and .NET

Jake Hackl — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:54:53 +0000

Have a client application that needed to post some referral sales data to a third-party via REST. I did this a long time ago and had to do a refresher course and these were two of the better posts I used for the final implementation. With all the .NET movement towards REST and yesterday’s post about Code-first development with Entity Framework 4 I have to admit that Microsoft is adapting the demand of developers (or the marketplace). There is still a vast gap until it catches up the speed of RoR in development but they are each distinct tools so that day may never come.

Those rest posts:

http://developer.yahoo.com/dotnet/howto-rest_cs.html

http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive/2009/02/14/posting-data-to-a-rest-service-using-c.aspx

Patient Money – Losing Weight the Smartphone Way, With a Nutritionist in Your Pocket – NYTimes.com

Jake Hackl — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:35:05 +0000

My wife turned me on to using LoseIt on the iPhone to track out diets and this NY Times piece writes on that use by others. Personally, I’ve found this latest take at caloric tracking incredibly simple and because of that maintainable. In the past it was easy to tire of logging a meal or snack but LoseIt makes it simple. This process has shown some insights on my diet and shed a few pounds too.

Patient Money – Losing Weight the Smartphone Way, With a Nutritionist in Your Pocket – NYTimes.com.

InfoQ: Architecting TekPub – Moving from ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails

Jake Hackl — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:13:38 +0000

Everytime I read another post about the simplicity and affordability of moving to Rails I go hmm; this time I’m going HMMMMM!

InfoQ: Architecting TekPub – Moving from ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails.

Tip/Trick: Enabling SSL on IIS 7.0 Using Self-Signed Certificates - ScottGu’s Blog

Jake Hackl — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:45:33 +0000

Tip/Trick: Enabling SSL on IIS 7.0 Using Self-Signed Certificates – ScottGu’s Blog.

Rebuilding my dev environment…always have to google this one.

Hivelogic – Installing Git on Snow Leopard

Jake Hackl — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:55:52 +0000

Hivelogic – Installing Git on Snow Leopard. Always comeback to Hivelogic

Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ – ahhh what?

Jake Hackl — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:14:47 +0000

With a new Windows7 VM on my MBP I have MSSQL Server 2008 R2, vs2008, vs2010…and sadly SourceGear Vault 3.5 which made it so SQL couldn’t connect to a server via the object browser.

Looked like this:

Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider’. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ‘{6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA}’ failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

These helpful posts fixed me up:

http://www.davidmoore.info/2009/08/19/solution-explorer-open-each-folder-in-same-window-error-and-sql-management-studio-ie-and-team-explorer-errors/

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12680&p=52790&hilit=management+studio#p52790

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqltools/thread/d5d3e5fc-d8ce-4f42-b7ea-9bbbb7756a20/

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The natural evolution of a startup and why it is bad

Jake Hackl — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:26:39 +0000

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The natural evolution of a startup and why it is bad. Good general overview, in a related sad note I have yet to experience all of these phases. Greatly looking forward to be able to have strong arguments for or against this in the future.