tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61039438243976392392012-05-18T14:44:08.814-04:00I'm a software engineer, Agile evangelist, cloud expert, and consultant with more than sixteen years experience building high quality software and leading wildly effective teams for my clients.Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-10232257119305909862011-04-18T21:47:00.002-04:002011-09-06T22:32:09.892-04:002011-09-06T22:32:09.892-04:00

Mule Design Studio co-founder Mike Monteiro leads a poignant and gratuitously profane talk on the importance of contracts and legal representation for freelancers and consultants. His perspective is–not surprisingly–that of a designer, but his message aptly transcends disciplines. If you've ever worked without a contract, inked a client agreement sans second thought, or wondered exactly how to

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com1http://www.kriscargile.com/2011/04/mike-monteiro-on-contracts-fuck-you-pay.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-79388615791173125072011-02-11T19:14:00.011-05:002011-02-17T08:26:40.127-05:002011-02-17T08:26:40.127-05:00

In case you didn’t know, Monday is a seminal day for computer science. It’s an event as as important as Newton’s publishing of the Principia in 1687, development of the integrated circuit in the 1940's, or the launch of ARPANet in 1969. Why? On Monday, IBM’s massively parallel computing cluster, christened “Waston” in honor of company pioneer Thomas Watson, will compete on Merv Griffin’s long

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2011/02/singularity-is-coming-on-monday.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-65642950196423478672011-01-04T18:22:00.011-05:002011-04-15T22:19:04.182-04:002011-04-15T22:19:04.182-04:00

This past year, it turns out, was a pretty good year for software peeps. Despite a spiraling economy, political infighting, and the widespread cutting of corporate budgets, experienced developers have remained in steady demand. The old adage about the good people always working holds true, but it's a bit of a relief to see it pass the test of practical application. And despite all of the bad news

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com1http://www.kriscargile.com/2011/01/ten-best-and-worst-of-2010.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-977699976740050772008-08-19T08:58:00.002-04:002011-08-22T00:33:00.439-04:002011-08-22T00:33:00.439-04:00

A week of up-time on IIS7 has given me some time to really dig in and asses the feasibility of WordPress on a Windows hosting platform. I was particularly interested in testing compatibility of the two, but I also wanted to gauge the performance of the new PHP pipeline in IIS7. I was pretty impressed with the speed of PHP on IIS7, and setup was painless. Sure there were none of the Apache

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2008/08/wordpress-on-iis7-revisited.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-34455094646919833582008-08-11T11:55:00.003-04:002011-08-22T00:40:03.652-04:002011-08-22T00:40:03.652-04:00

Aside from wrapping my export routine in a WordPress friendly plugin, accurately transforming the URLs from my Community Server website has been the most time-consuming part of the Community Server to WordPress migration. A domain name change further complicated things, quickly devolving URL rewriting into a non-trivial endeavor. Keep in mind, however, that how you ultimately handle URL

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com5http://www.kriscargile.com/2008/08/fun-with-url-rewriting-wordpress-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-31384766595242424172008-08-02T12:31:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:43:20.215-04:002011-08-22T00:43:20.215-04:00

If you've noticed that something looks markedly different here, then you're right. I recently made the descision to migrate my blogging back-end from Community Server to WordPress and, well, I couldn't be happier. That's not to say that Community Server is a bad product; it's not. Community Server is a very powerful, enterprise-class collaboration platform -- somewhat akin to Sharepoint -- with

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com2http://www.kriscargile.com/2008/08/migrating-community-server-blog-to.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-9167463843361807092008-06-29T10:08:00.001-04:002011-08-21T23:52:01.878-04:002011-08-21T23:52:01.878-04:00

There's been a marked increase in the affinity for Agile development methodologies over the past few years, and the southeast is no exception. The number of project leaders seeking resources with bone-fide Agile experience seems to at least on-par with those looking for heavyweight contenders, and for good reason: done correctly, Agile works. That's not to say that ubiquity is a panacea. First

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com2http://www.kriscargile.com/2008/06/atlanta-scrum-user-group-formed.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-8679756404486200572008-04-06T07:21:00.002-04:002011-08-22T00:54:56.618-04:002011-08-22T00:54:56.618-04:00

Though not particularly sexy, parsing a delimited string is a pretty common programming task. And while it's not difficult to build a couple of simple functions to slice and dice this type of data, you often find yourself duplicating this functionality to accommodate multiple return types. Add to this the fact that .NET doesn't support overloading by return type only, and you'll eventually end up

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com3http://www.kriscargile.com/2008/04/parsing-delimited-strings-using.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-55976799107082524512006-08-23T04:02:00.002-04:002011-08-21T23:57:02.181-04:002011-08-21T23:57:02.181-04:00

In many professional disciplines—programming, architecture, design, and so on—design patterns often provide a handy way to tackle a specific, well-defined task. When used correctly, they can save countless hours of mundane, boring tedium. Life is good. As a generally optimistic and analytical bunch, humans tend to think of patterns in this regard. But that's not to say that that all patterns are

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/08/patterns-of-failure.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-44026781591225950392006-08-10T15:07:00.002-04:002011-08-22T08:05:57.507-04:002011-08-22T08:05:57.507-04:00

If you've used Microsoft's Enterprise Library very much, then you've probably noticed how nicely the configuration files seem to come together. Despite being incredibly complex at times, these are often akin to the .NET provider model configuration, where entire configuration nodes are pluggable with previously unknown configuration types. The EL does this by allowing you to specify two types for

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/08/implementing-polymorphic-configuration.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-10982180850828804442006-07-26T11:58:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:43:55.617-04:002011-08-22T00:43:55.617-04:00

Microsoft's forthcoming Sandcastle and the now (officially) defunct NDoc project have been on a lot of people's minds lately. I'm personally big into documentation, and any tool that can help me to this end are invaluable. It's an added bonus if they're free. Those of you who share this philosophy have probably been following NDoc's progress since the 2.0 release of .NET. It's unfortunate the

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com12http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/07/world-smallest-violin-plays-for-kevin.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-38775112455082944112006-07-22T18:15:00.002-04:002011-09-02T22:50:48.902-04:002011-09-02T22:50:48.902-04:00

I can almost hear the hardcore developer-types grumble every time I talk about Flash. But make no mistake–Flash is a powerful tool, one that is more pervasive than you might like. So before you nod off and start drooling in your lap (I really hope you're wearing pants), read further. Besides, if you develop applications for the web, you're eventually going to run across Flash. And if you don't

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com2http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/07/flash-bang.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-11823082110524991612006-07-20T09:51:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:11:44.529-04:002011-08-22T00:11:44.529-04:00

I blogged back in April about the possibility that Microsoft would release its internal document generation tool to the public. It appears that they have finally decided to indeed release 'Sandcastle' to the general public. And not a moment too soon...with the lack of progress in the NDoc camp and high expense of commercial products like DocumentX!, Sandcastle will likely be a welcome addition to

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com2http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/07/microsoft-sandcastle.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-58014311920221684982006-06-29T05:03:00.002-04:002011-09-02T22:49:53.896-04:002011-09-02T22:49:53.896-04:00

After a somewhat extended break, I've again found myself developing for Microsoft's Content Management Server. Aside from some minor features and fixes added by new service packs, not that much has changed in MCMS 2002–with the exception of .NET 2.0 support added in SP2. If you've spent any amount of time trying to get your development environment to support this MCMS on .NET 2.0, you've

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/06/working-around-template-explorer-issue.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-41209861436266415392006-04-06T12:16:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:10:57.510-04:002011-08-22T00:10:57.510-04:00

A (fairly) recent post by MS on the MSDN Product Feedback Center indicates that they may release their internal CHM/HTML Help generation tool to the general public. This seems to be in direct response to the community-wide perception that the NDoc project has been dead for over a year, however, NDoc admin Kevin Downs has posted around the net to the contrary. In fact, it is rumored that there is

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com4http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/04/microsoft-to-release-internal-chm.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-40033397421540101502006-03-01T10:06:00.001-05:002011-08-22T00:22:47.292-04:002011-08-22T00:22:47.292-04:00

Doug Rohm continues his series on build customization using MSBuild, this time demonstrating integration with CruiseControl.NET. Go to http://dougrohm.com/cs/articles/56.aspx for the full story. klc;

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com1http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/03/custom-build-tasks-in-net-20-part-2.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-13416289063163783472006-01-13T06:36:00.002-05:002011-08-22T00:26:23.810-04:002011-08-22T00:26:23.810-04:00

A while back, I blogged about using alternate configuration contexts with the MSEL 1.1. It turns out that even with the improved configuration capabilities of .NET 2.0, using the MSEL in a loosely coupled, n-tier environment will also require you to jump through some hoops. The primary reason for this is that the .NET CLR only gives you one configuration context per AppDomain (Suzanne Cook has

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2006/01/using-msel-20-in-n-tier-environment.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-42166924193374008242005-12-12T06:03:00.001-05:002011-08-22T00:29:10.755-04:002011-08-22T00:29:10.755-04:00

I just finished up a small web-service oriented project, and probably would have pulled all of my hair out had it not been for two great debugging tools. The first, Chris Sells' XmlPrecompiler, is a command-line tool that mimics .NET's serialization of classes and helps you tackle any cryptic error messages returned to you by the serializer. The second is a WinForms front-end for Sells' tool

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/12/debugging-web-services.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-54799344903916914022005-12-08T08:54:00.004-05:002011-08-22T00:49:03.156-04:002011-08-22T00:49:03.156-04:00

If you've been lucky enough to do any development using .NET 2.0 and the CTP of the Enterprise Library 2.0 then you've likely noticed the absence of the Configuration Application Block in the new EL, as well as the new and improved configuration functionality built into the framework. In .NET 2.0 you are not limited to executable projects for built-in access to configuration data via App.Config (

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com1http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/12/custom-configuration-context-in-msel.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-82346335303844996752005-11-24T02:53:00.001-05:002011-08-22T00:03:07.842-04:002011-08-22T00:03:07.842-04:00

I just finished reading Jason Bock's book on CIL, CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET. If you're not familiar with CIL (often abbreviated as just IL), its the core language of the .NET platform. Despite some of the poor reviews of Bock's book floating around the Internet, I found it to be a very helpful crash-course on CIL, complete with a real world sample application. I was originally

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com2http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/11/mastering-cil.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-59886120558721978682005-11-10T08:31:00.001-05:002011-08-22T00:28:33.967-04:002011-08-22T00:28:33.967-04:00

I've been evaluating VS.NET 2005 and .NET 2.0 beta and CTP versions for a while now, but I've never had the nerve to install them on my primary development machine. In fact, a beta release installation of the v2.0 Framework totally hosed one of my test boxes.So naturally, my first question when the release version became available earlier this week was, is it really safe to install all this stuff

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/11/vsnet-2005-side-by-side-installation.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-79334150816901146752005-11-09T05:00:00.001-05:002011-08-22T00:29:47.432-04:002011-08-22T00:29:47.432-04:00

I've always been a big fan of using a persistence layer to map persistent data to business objects in enterprise systems. And as with most other things, I've found this to be an area of passionate debate among other developers, and as with most other things its often a hard sell. In any case, I've found that using a dedicated mapping layer will significantly reduce coupling, greatly enhance

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/11/understanding-persistence-layers.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-74837568839463235662005-10-27T06:32:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:20:46.886-04:002011-08-22T00:20:46.886-04:00

Microsoft has finally made all of the digital artifacts from this year's PDC available online. Check them out at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/. klc;

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/10/official-pdc-artifacts-available-online.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-89257694123980915842005-09-29T04:34:00.002-04:002011-09-09T22:00:23.049-04:002011-09-09T22:00:23.049-04:00

For the two of you that have noticed I'm out of town again, I've spent the last two days in the ScrumMaster Certification course in Richmond, VA. I was initiallya bit disappointed that Scrum co-founder Ken Schwaber was unable to lead the class (word has it that his recovery is going well), though subs Kert Peterson and Jim York have done an excellent job (the quality of the venue chosen for the

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/09/burnin-it-down-scrum-style.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6103943824397639239.post-66937039570524983452005-09-16T06:51:00.001-04:002011-08-22T00:20:30.665-04:002011-08-22T00:20:30.665-04:00

I was surprised at the big turnout for the Advances in Agile Development PDC session today. I was also happy to see that NUnit creator James Newkirk was part of the five member panel of experts (read Newkirk's blog entry outlining his PDC involvement here). The discussion, which consisted mostly of a Q&A session, seemed to steer towards Microsoft's use of XP internally by the Patterns and

Kristopher Cargilehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15499066457899479832noreply@blogger.com0http://www.kriscargile.com/2005/09/pdc-panel-discussion-on-agile.html