Archives

NHibernate 3.0.0 has a bug which silently truncates data going into varbinary(MAX) fields to 8000 bytes — not a pleasant one to find in production because your test documents weren't big enough! This stackoverflow answer contains a workaround for hbm file mappings; translated to FluentNHibernate aut… read more

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about Software Craftsmanship — triggered by the Dan North’s recent criticism of the manifesto. Martin Fowler seems to think the movement is partly a reaction to the ‘de-technicalisation’ of Agile, while Bob Martin responds with “we just don’t like w… read more

I was trying to run a unit test on an MVC 3 controller and check the output of a RedirectToRouteResult when I got the following compiler error: Cannot apply indexing with [] to an expression of type 'System.Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary' This confusing and clearly incorrect error message actually… read more

The Microsoft Online Services Sign In client does a once-only configuration of Outlook when you first sign in to create a BPOS profile. If that profile is subsequently deleted, Outlook will refuse to start with "The profile name is not valid", but the Sign In client gives you no option to … read more

The Whereoscope guys have put up a well-publicised post explaining why they prefer Android development to iOS. One of the main gripes they had was the lack of garbage collection; I felt I had to put forward my take on the GC question. GC has been available in Cocoa since 2007, and there’s no technic… read more

Attempting to verify a domain for Microsoft BPOS (cloud-hosted Exchange & Sharepoint) and this gem pops up. Giving multiple possible reasons for failure without indicating which one it was is pure laziness on the part of the developer. There is no way I can tell if the domain has been validated… read more

I had the privilege of doing a brief presentation at the 2010 Perth .NET Community of Practice DevJam last night. I haven’t spoken at an event like this before, so it was a new experience for me — I managed to get the timing about right after a few practice runs, and got a two-screen Keynote slidesh… read more

Now we have blocks in Objective-C, we no longer need to define standalone methods to implement a custom array sort. However, I’m always forgetting the exact syntax, so, mostly as a reminder to myself: [alerts sortUsingComparator:(NSComparator)^(Alert *a1, Alert *a2) { if ([a1.severity compare:a2.se… read more

As mentioned previously, I’m boning up on Haskell. I prefer to learn by doing, so I’m attempting to build a functioning application as part of the process. I’ve struggled to find much entry level (real application) source code, so I'll be posting my progress as I go in the hope that it will help oth… read more

Attempting to cabal install happstack on OS X resulted in numerous errors, including: ghc: could not execute: /Library/Frameworks/GHC.framework/Versions/612/usr/lib/ghc-6.12.3/ghc-asm There’s a bug with the Haskell platform installer for OS X — the shebang line in the file /Library/Frameworks/GHC.… read more