Since I started using Mercurial a few months ago I’ve fallen in love with it. There was a bit of a learning curve for getting up and running but I found that the Tortoise tools are really intuitive and eliminated some of the pain. Most importantly though, Mercurial addresses the single biggest problem I had when working away from home – no repository access.
Fiddler Troubles
This morning I was included on an email asking a few of us if we’ve been able to use Fiddler. He said when he tried to use it he saw it do its update check then make a request to oscex-en.url.trendmicro.com but it wouldn’t capture anything else regardless of which sites he visited.
I’ve been using Fiddler a lot lately to help test a new RESTful WCF service I’m prototyping and hadn’t been having any trouble with it but then I remembered that I didn’t have filters enabled. I clicked over to the Filters tab and checked the “Show only Internet Explorer” traffic, refreshed a page, then nothing… Fiddler wasn’t capturing anything. What gives? This worked the last time I used it.
I Survived My First GiveCamp!
I did it! I made it through my first GiveCamp! For the benefit of those not familiar with GiveCamp it’s a weekend-long event where technologists donate their time to provide software solutions to non-profit organizations that otherwise could not afford them.
When we say “weekend-long” we mean it. This was a caffeine-fueled 48 hour marathon of requirements gathering, design, code, CSS, collaboration, and stand-ups. The only thing missing was sleep! The lack of sleep was a small price to pay though to see how our work was going to breathe new life into these organizations.
System.Diagnostics.Debugger
I hardly ever use the classes in the System.Diagnostics namespace. As much as I’d like everyone to believe that it’s because I’m such a rockstar that I don’t need them, it’s really just that I generally use other techniques. With Visual Studio providing so many tools for debugging I’ve rarely had reason to dig into this namespace much. Sure, I’ve used the Debug, Trace, and EventLog classes but I haven’t taken the time to investigate what else is in there.
Cast or GetHashCode?
I really hate to resurrect this issue but after some recent conversations I think it’s necessary. We have a lot of code – particularly in the deep, dark recesses of our application that no one dares touch – that uses GetHashCode() to retrieve the underlying value of an enumeration item.
I’ve been slowly working to eliminate this technique from the system but it works, has been in use for eight or so years, and old habits die hard. An unfortunate side effect though, is that less experienced developers see this pattern repeated throughout the code, internalize the practice, and propagate it. If GetHashCode() works why should we care?
Windows Phone 7.5 Subtleties
I’m a little behind the curve here. I could have updated my phone with a developer preview a while ago but decided that keeping my primary phone in a known stable state was more important than getting a shiny new toy no matter how tempting it was. Besides, I already get enough heat from some half-eaten fruit loving friends about being a Microsoft/Windows Phone fanboy so I really didn’t need to give them any more fodder!
I’ve been following a few blogs and reading about the new features that Mango was bringing to the platform so I thought I was prepared. I was wrong.
Ringtones in Windows Phone 7.5
Windows Phone 7.5 brings a feature that really should have been available since the initial release – custom ringtones! After updating my phone last night and exploring many of its new features (more to come on that) I decided to create a few of my own.
According to the documentation on the Windows Phone site ringtones need to meet 4 criteria:
- MP3 of WMA format
- No more than 40 seconds long
- No more than 1 MB
- DRM-free
The documentation goes on to say that you can create a ringtone in Zune by setting the file’s genre to “ringtone” and syncing it to the phone. Now I don’t know about your music library but I’m guessing that it’s similar to mine in that most of it fails both the second and third criteria so simply changing a file’s genre doesn’t cut it.
What I did to create my ringtones was load the desired tracks into audacity. In Audacity I isolated the sections that would become my ringtones and pasted them into new tracks. For an extra touch I added a 2-second fade out at the end of each one. I saved each file to a folder already monitored by Zune so it would discover them automatically. In Zune I updated the artist, album, and genre then copied them to the phone. The files were then immediately available for selection at the top of the ringtones list.
For the curious, the two tracks I converted were both from Benny Benassi – Electroman and Cinema [Skrillex Remix]. I ended up choosing Electroman.
10/6/2011 Update
A few days after posting this I learned that the phone also supports contact specific ringtones. To set a ringtone for a contact just open that contact’s card and click the edit button. On the edit screen you’ll see a new ringtone option listed under name. I haven’t set any ringtones this way yet but I was happy to find it as an option.
Magic Manager Guided Tour
I’ve just published a guided tour of Magic Manager. Check out the video below and if you like what you see hop on over to the marketplace. Enjoy!
Debugging XSLT in VS2010
My team has been working on some new functionality that’s really configuration heavy. One of the challenges we’ve been facing with this project is managing all of the changes to the central configuration file. In an attempt to add some order to the chaos we decided to start with a base file and apply a series of XSLT sheets to it so we can ensure a consistent state. I haven’t worked with XSLT in years so aside from relearning the language, one of the first things I did was start looking for a tool that could help me build and test my new sheet.
October Speaking Engagement – Indy TFS
I’ll be presenting Web performance and load testing in Visual Studio 2010 to the Indy TFS user group on October 5, 2011. In this talk we’ll explore some of the basic test management capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 before diving in to building and executing both Web performance and load tests. Some areas we’ll examine include:
- Test recording tests
- Parameterizing tests
- Extraction rules
- Validation rules
- Data binding
- Load test scenarios
Location
Microsoft Office
500 East 96th St
Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240
[Map]
Doors open at 5:30 PM with the meeting starting at 6:00. Pizza and drinks will be provided.
Register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=157231.
I hope to see you there!
Didactic Code 