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In my previous post ( here ) I showed you how to setup and get running with MEF. However, what I left out from that post is how to setup MEF to allow ‘recomposition’, which is the fancy way of saying to allow your application to discover new plugins at run time. Allowing your application...
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Earlier this week I had a piece of JavaScript that I wanted to like this: var index = someArray.indexOf(someObject); The problem there is that the indexOf method of the Array object was introduced in JavaScript 1.6, which isn't implemented in all browsers (actually, IE seems to be the real problem...
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As I was trying to complete the integration of a new feature into our application I figured it was about time that I fired up the service (the app is a windows service for background processing). Low and behold when I did all hell broke lose. Yes, I have spent almost 2 weeks working on the...
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If your application needs extension points what do you do? Building a plugin based system is not cutting edge, it is not rocket science. However, it does take a little effort and can be a bit painful depending on your implementation. The guys at MS (Glen Block and crew) has been working on...
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4 Advil later and my head really hurts. Here is a little story about how a simple little typo can really cause major headaches and pain. Yesterday I was in the process of setting up one of our new WCF services to use Jimmy Bogard’s solution to use StructureMap to create our services. At one...
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Oh, the woes of supporting IE6 (or, better put, IE666 — the browser of the beast.) Halloween is definitely upon us. Today I spent a good chunk of time trying to identify the source of a problem in my application. Right now I'm in the process of jQuery-fying some legacy JavaScript, which includes...
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Over the weekend I was having a conversation with my wife and we were not communicating on the same wave length. After a few minutes of talking in circles it dawned on us that we had not established the context around the conversation and we had no real understanding of what either of us was saying...
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This post is part of a series called JavaScript Demystified . Answer quick. Do you know what date is being created here? var year = '2009', month = '09', day = '01'; var date = new Date( parseInt(year), parseInt(month), parseInt(day) ); At first glance, it wouldn't surprising...
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Today I was trying to debug an issue with some new code that we are working on. During my initial development all my tests worked and everything was fine. However, when I actually hooked up all the pieces and tried to run the new code as a full unit I was receiving the dreaded “ StructureMap...
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This is a tip for anyone using Firefox and Firebug for web development that is not leveraging the Profiles feature of that browser. Recent versions of Firebug (after v1.3 I think) removed the ability to enable Firebug panes on a per-domain basis. Now it's kind of all or nothing. And you know that...
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One of these days I was chatting with Derik and we were talking about refactoring and when to stop refactoring. We thought it was funny (and embarrassing) how sometimes, after a few consecutive refactorings, we are back at the starting point. This type of Circular Refactoring is a real productivity enemy...
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Recently I was forced to do full time development on my MacBook because I killed my Windows Laptop (btw, turns out it is a bad idea to spill milk on the keyboard of a laptop… who knew). When doing this I was running Windows7 under VM via Fusion. Everything was working great……until...
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I know that reflection is nothing new, in fact many people may even call it old hat. However, it does still have its place and can still be very, very useful. The other day I wanted to write a set of tests which would ensure that out developers put the [Serializable] attribute on all our...
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This is just a quick little rant on my part. In my opinion a property should be used for simply getting/setting of a value. You should NOT have any logic inside your getter/setter (ok, I will add a 'caviot' to this rule and say that I am ok with doing string formatting on the getter). If you...
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Ok, so this sounds like it should be drop dead simple and it is, however it is not (at least to me) 100% intuitive how you could accomplish this. Here is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to copy ALL of my compiled dlls from my build to a ‘staging’ location and I wanted to do this in a simple...