Blog posts page 15 of 44

Where developer is succinct

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Radio 4 covered the The Six Word Memoir competition, inspired by Earnest Hemingwayโ€™s wager he could tell a complete story in just six words. He deliciously delivered โ€œFor sale: Baby shoes, never wornโ€ earning him $10.

Expressing a life story in six words is just as tricky. Some of my favorite submissions include:

The pragmatic .NET developer

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Long-time friend, fellow co-host of the GSDF and the coding genius behind the open-source Ogre3D engine Steve Streeting has written an interesting piece on Open source adoption; countering the fear and doubt. I have no doubt that this was fueled by a lengthy discussion last night in the Ship & Crown pub โ€“ a common ritual after our GSDF meetings.

The reasons why I adopted .NET as my primary platform despite being tied to a single-supplier are:

Language Integrated Query: An introduction presentation online

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This eveningโ€™s presentation on Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is now available from my appearances page.

The event went well with 12 developers (itโ€™s a small island) and took a less time to produce because I didnโ€™t write a script for but slides to lead us through areas I wanted to cover.

Language Integrated Query: An introduction talk tomorrow

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Iโ€™m just finishing up the slides, notes and writing code samples for my LINQ presentation at the Guernsey Software Developer Forum tomorrow evening.

Hopefully the broader scope of this presentation will mean a few new faces โ€“ the previous talks on Subversion and web application security might have been a little specific for a such a small audience (Guernsey is around 70,000 people on an island 9 miles long).

What being open means to Apple & Microsoft

Former Apple engineer Jens Alfke believes Appleโ€™s external image has been polished until featureless. The restrictive staff blogging policies, the veil of secrecy around future plans and a carefully orchestrated three-person spokes-team of Jobs, Schiller and Ive lead to a very impersonal closed business.

It certainly wasnโ€™t always this way. The original Mac team appeared in Rolling Stone magazine with credit in about boxes, a practice that was continued at NeXT but abolished by Mac OS X Beta. Jobs makes regular comparisons between engineers and artists and touted individual thinking in the Think Different campaign and artists like recognition with signatures on art and credits on film.

LINQ presentation at Guernsey Developer Forum

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I will be giving a talk at the Guernsey Software Developer Forum at the end of the month on Microsoftโ€™s new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) with particular emphasis on the capabilities and object-relational mapping characteristics of LINQ to SQL.

Now confirmed for:

Whatโ€™s in your laptop bag?

Since my new laptop arrived Iโ€™ve been fine tuning my accessories in search of the developer-on-the-move setup. Here is my current contents complete with shameless Amazon Affiliate product links where applicable ;-)

My parents bought me the Brenthaven Pro 15-17 Backpack for Christmas. It has a great number of sections and compartments yet can still be thinly packed with the padding contributing to a comfortable wear. The only negatives are that the finish seems a little rough in places and that the rigid laptop protection area seems to be designed to hold a laptop almost twice as thick as a MacBook Pro despite claims of being โ€˜Designed for a 15.4โ€ณ MacBook and 17โ€ณ MacBook Proโ€™.

Mac freebies for Christmas

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Spaces is new in Leopard bringing virtual desktops to the masses. Leopard gives you a number of ways to switch between spaces including a menu-item drop down and configurable keyboard shortcuts.

To move a window to another space you drag it to the edge of the screen and wait a moment but curiously you canโ€™t use this great technique without a window to switch!

Thoughts on awareness of security vulnerabilities & full disclosure

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HTML, SQL and XSS injection vulnerabilities arenโ€™t new but they are still largely ignored by developers.

My first encounter with these issues was in 1999 whilst writing an extranet e-commerce web site. Back then the ASP fix consisted of Server.HtmlEncode for all output and a Replace("'", """")Replace("'", """") for strings heading to SQL (other types headed there via CInt/CLong/CDate and I wasnโ€™t aware of parametrized queries).