Simple & Easy Notifications Using BoxCar

Notifio was an awesome tool I made use of to make up for the lack of screen notifications for new mail in older version of iOS. It was also a great application in general that allowed me to send notification to my phone without having to write my own application specifically for iOS, or send SMS message or the like. However, ever since I found out that Notifio’s time was short (it seems the service will be retired soon) I have been looking for something that could replace it.

April 14, 2012 Read
Filtrete Touchscreen WiFi-Enabled Programmable Thermostat

Last fall I purchased and installed the Filtrete Touchscreen WiFi-Enabled Programmable Thermostat in our home after reading about it here on Scott Hanselman’s blog. It does exactly what it sounds like, plus it comes with a pretty cool iPhone app (I am sure there is an android version as well). Now that we have it installed, it would be hard to imagine life without it. It seems really lazy (and it is) but the thought of having to actually get up and interact with a device on the wall seems like a lot work.

April 13, 2012 Read
Calling external assemblies with overloaded methods using the params keyword in BizTalk 2010

I created the following method, calling it from a BizTalk mapping functoid not long ago. public string TrimAll(params string[] addressInfo) { … } I used params because I need to pass in eight string arguments which I was preforming more or less the same operations on. I was curious to see if BizTalk would resolve the method properly. As you’d expect, it did not, and gave me an exception about the number of arguments needed when I tried to test the map.

January 13, 2012 Read
Continuous Integration/Deployment My Own Example

Previously, I had talked about why continuous integration (CI) is the best approach to software development in terms of improving software quality and saving time and effort for developers on a team. Now I want to explain how I maintain this page among other projects using continuous integration and continuous deployment and why this is beneficial even for one person projects. I should note that what I am about to describe I would not exactly recommend using in a business environment, I’ll describe that a later (however, if you don’t have any CI environment, this would be a huge improvement).

May 6, 2011 Read
Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer crypto currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network. BitCoin has garnered quite a bit of attention of late. What is it? Why use it? I’ll try to answer this below. Why BitCoin? With all money there is the problem of double spending. With electronic representation of money in the modern age, it is easy for a financial institution to say that it has your money and then loan it to someone else, then loan it to someone else, etc.

April 30, 2011 Read
Continuous Integration or To Err is Human

I am constantly astounded at the number of shops out there that do not have source control not to mention even the most rudimentary build server or continuous integration environment. Or worse, there are developers that scoff at the idea of being ‘held back’ by things like this. More commonly management considers this a waste of time. My Personal Experience Fresh out of college I worked for a company that had a full-fledged continuous integration environment.

April 8, 2011 Read
Filtering for Jobs

This is a method I have used when searching for jobs in previous years that I also found was a good technique for keeping your eye on the local job market when not looking for jobs, which has plenty advantages as well. Essentially this technique is to filter various job posting sites that deliver content via RSS then subscribe to those RSS feeds. In this way can have an ongoing view of job information that you care about.

March 27, 2011 Read
T4 Transformations for ASP.NET paths

T4 is an engine built into Visual Studio for code generation. It has been around since VS 2005 and I have been playing with it for a while. In the past I used it to generate unit tests just after compile time that used the templates and reflection to automatically test a particularly nasty DB persistence layer for one of our company’s products. It ended up uncovering about 4000 inconsistencies and potential bugs.

February 16, 2011 Read
Notifio - Free and easy mail notifications for your iPhone

If you are moving from the blackberry to the iPhone, or just a new iPhone user, you may be disappointed to know that the only real mail notification for the iPhone is the ‘ding’ that you here whenever it comes in. Whereas on the blackberry you get a small flashing light on the top of your phone, and in some models you can customize the color based on the person that sent the email.

February 12, 2011 Read
BizTalk - Importing Bindings with Many Password

If you ever spend much time exporting and importing apps in BizTalk you will quickly learn that doing so does not copy the passwords of your locations, ftp and otherwise along with it. My currently client’s environment uses copious amounts of ftp locations, too many probably, though that is a different story. However I find myself spending too much time copying the passwords to the new environment every time I import an app.

February 6, 2011 Read