tombatron.com - i writez teh codez

Getting Posh-Git to Work

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:47:00 GMT

I Read Phil Haack's post on Posh Git, and wanted to use it. I am starting from square one with PowerShell so naturally I had some problems getting it to work. What follows are notes that I'm putting up here simply to remind me what I had to do.

Iterating Over a Tuple in .NET

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:56:00 GMT

While I'm thinking about tuples and .NET I figured I should take the subject one step further. One of the things that I referenced in my previous post (see this) was that you can't iterate over a tuple in .NET. System.Tuple doesn't implement IEnumerable. Some people might ask why you would want to? I'll be honest I haven't given it much thought. At this point it's all academic as I haven't encountered a problem that screams for a tuple let alone the ability to iterate over it. But let's say you have and you want to iterate over the values of a tuple.

Tuple! Love that word.

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:06:00 GMT

New in the .NET 4.0 framework is the System.Tuple class. A tuple is a data structure used for storing a sequence of values. Tuples are something that have been available in Python since... hrmmm, I don't really know Python's history ~~at all~~ that well so as far as I'm concerned they've always been available. Either way, it doesn't matter, all I want to do is compare and contrast tuples in .NET and Python. Why? Because I use both of them that's why. And I needed a subject to write about.

Having Fun with a Console Application

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:36:00 GMT

We've all used the "Console Application" project template in Visual Studio at least once. For me console applications usually amount to no more than a sketch pad for code that I plan to implement elsewhere. Well this morning I was itching to write some code and couldn't really think of anything productive to do, so I figured I would mess around with a console application. What follows is what I came up with, which was practically useless, but I still thought it was cool.

Moving On...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:51:00 GMT

There comes a time in every developer's life when it's time to move on. Sometimes it's your choice, sometimes the choice is made for you, either way you're going. This post is about how I've dealt with both situations.

Using Linq For More Readable Code

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:03:00 GMT

I've recently come into a lot of free time (more on that later) so I thought I would start messing around with some Project Euler problems. Project Euler for those of you who don't know is a series of 300+ math problems that are/should be easily solvable using an appropriate algorithm and computer program. Some problems are easier to solve than others but one thing that you shouldn't lose sight of when solving even the easy problems is code readability.

Utilizing a node.js TCP Server with .NET

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:59:00 GMT

So this morning I finally decided to jump on to the band wagon and check out node.js. I came away from watching about 20 minutes of this video with a sense that this is a pretty cool tool. In fact, I came away from watching the video wanting to create something using it. But alas, the only thing that I could come up with was an overly simplistic blog example. But just to spice it up a bit, I'm going to use TCP instead of HTTP.

Android 4.0 - First Impressions: Browser

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:59:00 GMT

The news broke earlier today that the latest version of the Android OS was being OTA deployed to the Nexus S. That was music to my ears as anyone who knows me will tell you that I've been waiting for this update to be released since it was officially announced. Since I'm not a patient person I kind of jumped ahead of the OTA update line and installed the update manually. After the update was complete the first thing that I did was check out the new version of the "Browser" application.

PyCharm and Tabs

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:32:00 GMT

Whether you are new to Python development or not, you know (please tell me you know) that tabs are important. My go to editor for all things Python is called PyCharm. If you couldn't tell I think PyCharm is 'da bomb'. However, the default handling of the tab key is a bit puzzling. Because by default it doesn't use the tab character.

I'll just do it myself...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:33:00 GMT

A few days ago I tweeted for suggestions on a good plug-in for Windows Live Writer for doing Python code samples. As I suspected the suggestions didn't come flying in because let's face it, I don't exactly have an army of people following me. The plug-in that I currently using is called "Insert Code for Windows Live Writer", it's simple, open source and get's the job done. On the other hand it looks like it has effectively been abandoned. But that's OK because the source is available (and easy to follow), so I just made the changes I wanted myself and uploaded a source patch (not that I expect anything to be done with it).