In Absentia

As part of transitioning to a new API, I wanted a way to mark the old API as obsolete, so that Visual Studio (or ReSharper) would flag using of the old API as an error.

After my previous blog post on the subject, my good friend Avi Pinto asked if it was possible to teach ReSharper to treat an ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper extension method to understand and navigate to relative paths within the project. I’m happy to report that not only this is possible, it also requires almost no effort at all!

I noticed that some of my unit tests have a ReSharper warning on the A.CallTo() methods of FakeItEasy, suggesting that some local variables are captured implicitly by the lambda expression.

While working with a client to create a new version of their software, one of the tasks was creating a service that talked to a hardware laser tracker, a device which allows tracking certain points (targets) over a large distance.

While running some of my tests today, I suddenly got an IndexOutOfRangeException, with the following stack trace:

My colleague was annoyed that pressing Win-Enter on Windows 8 would pop open Windows Narrator, and there was seemingly no way to disable it. He told me that the answer he found on one of the forums suggested removing the execute permission from the Narrator.exe file, however, since this involves preventing file execution, this led me to an idea to try and use my old friend Image File Execution Options, which I’m happy to report, worked!

It is often said that all problems in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection. All, except performance problems. Typically, when performance problems occur, it’s best to approach them like peeling an onion - removing abstractions one by one.

I am, by no means, a professional speaker. I am developer with passion for technology and learning, and being known for talking a lot, I sometimes speak at local user groups about particular topics. Here are some tips I’ve gathered for making my presentations a little bit better.

I use the incredible Everything to find files on my computers. It’s very fast and I have bound it to Win-Z (but not on Windows 8, more on that in another post) for easy access.

I just got my brand new HP EliteBook 8570w. I was looking for a new development machine for a while, and after long consideration decided on this custom build of the Ivy Bridge-based EliteBook. Here are the (important) specs: