I love a cold beer. Not just because it’s refreshing and makes me worry less about the world’s problems, but also because of beer’s fungibility. Let me explain; I can go down to the store and buy a beer and it’s pretty much the same as any other beer I might purchase elsewhere. Sure, there are different standards of beer and I’m going to pay a few dollars more for my favourite Little Creatures [http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.littlec...

I was a little confused this week as to why ReSharper was recommending using implicitly typed variable declarations in a VS2010 solution targeting .NET 2. Somewhere in my mind I had directly associated the “var” keyword with the release of .NET 3.5 so this looked a little odd to me: As it turns out, the var keyword is a feature of the compiler, not the .NET CLR. The same is true for automatic properties and object initialisers. The bottom line is that you can use these features in VS08 or...

Here’s another one of those Subversion idiosyncrasies which threw me the other day and I couldn’t readily find an answer for. When committing a changeset I kept getting the error “Can’t create directory” followed by the the path of the repository on the server then “The system cannot find the path specified”. The first thing to get clear is that this is a Subversion error, it’s not related to the local working directory nor is it related to Tortoise SVN. Looking at the path in the image abo...

It starts with that sinking feeling and all sorts of questions running through your head: > When did I last backup? Did I include everything? Does the backup actually work? When did I last try restoring it? How much unrecoverable data could I have lost? Losing data can be an absolute stomach churning experience. Those first moments when the penny drops and you realise you’ve got a big, big problem are absolutely nightmarish and without a robust backup strategy it’s just a matter of time...

I’ve got both a desktop and a laptop running SQL08 Developer Edition on top of 64 bit Windows 7 which until today, did not play nicely together. I could not get a remote connection from Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio to the other machine nor could I make an ADO.NET connection. Every attempt to connect resulted in a lengthy delay followed by a message such as the following from SQL Management Studio when trying to register the server: “Error connection to [machine name]” “A network-rela...

Here’s the scenario; you have a Subversion repository that has been doing some multitasking. For whatever reason (convenience, laziness, ignorance), the one repository was used to store multiple projects and having now seen the light you want to split it out into separate repositories. This is entirely possible but it takes a bit of work and in many cases, quite a bit of trouble shooting (the kind you won’t normally find in the SVN books). I’ve done this a number of times recently and learnt a l...

Just in case anyone has passed by in recent days and noticed the Twitter panel on my blog displaying tweets that are, well, inconsistent with my normal tweets, fear not! It seems the geniuses behind the Twitter webpart for the Blogger engine have made a small mistake in the JavaScript variable department. In short, it appears an undefined variable is somehow inserted into a JSON request URL to Twitter and unsurprisingly, the Tweets of an undefined user are being requested. Surprisingly enough...

I’m fortunate enough to work in a role which allows me to spend of lot of time talking to people in all sorts of places around the world on a daily basis. As much as I enjoy this varied communication, it plays absolute havoc with your working hours. It’s not so bad speaking to folks in the Americas (I’m a morning person!) and that works well for them but throw in a country somewhere between Sydney and New York and you always end up with a pretty inconvenient time for at least one or two parties....

Unfortunately the tyranny of distance has kept me well and truly away from Microsoft PDC09 [http://microsoftpdc.com] but it hasn’t meant I’ve had to miss out completely. Seeing so much exciting information released about new technology (which happens to be my favourite kind!) made me want to get what excited me down online. Silverlight 4 Beta In case you’re feeling like it was only yesterday that Silverlight 3 was released, you’re almost right; it was back in July. The velocity of this product...

Often times in the software industry you’ll hear statements suggesting that the quality of  the underlying software code is really not that important and what matters most is immediate term customer satisfaction, primarily achieved by delivering what they asked for within time and budget. This is usually a position put forward by the customer facing folks within the software industry who, in their defence, probably don’t have that strong a grasp on why code quality is important simply because th...