I wrote this for fun on the train a while ago, and just came across it again recently. So I figured I may as well post it. The code implements a simple game of life simulation, but the interesting bit is that it parallelizes the process using the TPL. I uploaded it to github as a gist, [...]
I recently posted a nice little helper class that I had been using on windows phone 7. This version works on the desktop CLR (there’s a minor difference in how you create a web request) … and also adds a new method that lets you get direct access to the response stream. So I figured [...]
Now that the .NET landscape has a new “screen” to design for in the form of Windows Phone 7 (WM6.x doesn’t count ), we need to start thinking about how to provide users with consistent metaphors and input mechanisms. Microsoft’s patterns and practices group wrote the book on web and desktop application architectures (literally). One [...]
Question: What’s the easiest way to let a custom application re-use accounts from a PHPBB installation? Answer: The first thing that occurred to me was that I’d have to look over the PHPBB user tables, connect to mysql, and read the user’s password (which I assume is hashed) to do the authentication. The second idea [...]
Recently, I’ve been reading the book Coders at Work, where author Peter Seibel interviews lots of well known developers. One of the questions that he often asks is whether they have tried Literate Programming, an idea introduced by Donald Knuth in the 70s. Although most of them say no, some of them have tried it [...]
When Dave asked me for some help with a little side project of his that he was researching, I jumped at the chance. The requirement was to execute a powershell script programmatically and pass in some parameters that were gathered from a simple form. I had been wanting to learn more about powershell since it [...]
I wrote a post over on the nGenSoft Blog talking about how to gain Static Access to Request-Specific Data: As we have all come to learn in the last decade plus of web development, web applications are inherently stateless. Unlike their native client cousins, every request must be treated as if it was done in [...]
There are many different types of productivity, today I’m going to talk about the things that you do on a day to day basis. A few years ago, I found myself unhappy with my level of productivity and decided to figure out a way to manage my time better. As one would do when trying [...]
I’ve mentioned to a few people that I recently set my kids up with PCs. I think back to my first interactions with a computer when I was very young. My parents bought an Acer IBM Clone from Fingerhut. I learned so much from using that machine … in an effort to play prince of [...]
So unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or don’t care about XNA ), you obviously know that v3.1 was announced last week during the GDC. Not a lot of info has really been put out there as far as specifics go, this seems to be one of the best sources so far: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2009/03/24/9506368.aspx Support [...]