Archives

Matt Baxter-Reynolds over at ZDNet claims that Swift is “a total mishit that’s badly judged the state of the software development industry” and that “What Apple should have done, years ago, was bought Xamarin”. I disagree with this on a number of levels. I think the crux of the argument hinges on th… read more

I had a great time at YOW! West over the last few days - highlights for me were the talks from Jeff Patton, Dave Thomas and the unsung Stew Gleadow. Slides for my talk are available for download here. I’ve also made the source code for the demo 'Wishlist' app available on bitbucket. During Dave’s ta… read more

Dustin Curtis came out recently with this piece, subsequently picked up by Marco Arment. The gist of it is that the tablet market will eventually be replaced by smartphones, backed up by demographic figures from Pew Research: Younger people, on the contrary, simply do their computing entirely on th… read more

Just an update to let everyone know I’ll be presenting at the YOW! West conference that’s on 13th - 14th of May. I’ve wanted to attend the conference on the east coast for a number of years, but haven’t made it to one yet - hopefully our WA flavoured version will be as good (or better). My presentat… read more

So, I built a game. Following the yanking of Flappy Bird from the App Store (and the subsequent proliferation of indie apps), a colleague said: “We should build an app called ‘Flappy Word’, where instead of flying through pipes, you collect letters and make words”. This sounded like an absolute winn… read more

MVC5/Web API 2 introduced a new IAuthenticationFilter (as opposed the the IAuthorizationFilter we needed to dual-purpose in the past), as well as a substantial overhaul of the user model with ASP.NET Identity. Unfortunately, the documentation is abysmal, and all the blog articles focus on the System… read more

I was asked to review the new LevelDB book from Packt (disclaimer: I know the author and was provided a free electronic copy). I’ve done a reasonable amount of experimental hacking using LevelDB on iOS in the past,so I was keen to see whether there was much I’d learn from a ‘Getting Started’ book. … read more

I’ve wanted real build server traffic lights since I first implemented a Continuous Integration server in the mid 2000s. In those days, the trendy thing to do was to hook up red & green lava lamps to your build server, but CCTray’s red/green/yellow status indicators always seemed better suited … read more

I was working on an entity class for an OData endpoint when I ran across the following doozy: The type 'System.Data.Services.Common.EntityPropertyMappingAttribute' exists in both '...Microsoft.Data.OData.dll' and '...System.Data.Services.Client.dll' It looks like Microsoft has duplicated this type… read more

I was repeatedly getting “execution of scripts is disabled on this system” while attempting to run Invoke-Command on a remote machine, even after running Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned on that box. Eventually the penny dropped – I’d been running 32 bit Powershell interactively, whereas Invoke-Comm… read more