In Absentia

At Typemock, we’re making the change of moving our source control from SVN to Mercurial (Hg). Side note: Hg is a symbol for Mercury in the periodic table.

We use TeamCity as our continuous integration server, and it took some trickery to configure it to recognize the repository. For this, I will use a repository hosted at RepositoryHosting.

Here are the steps required for configuring Mercurial with SSH in TeamCity:

Yesterday I attended the 2nd Software Craftsmanship meeting, led by Uri Lavi, held in the headquarters of PicScout.

Scott Guthrie wrote about VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools update, and I went to the Extensions Gallery to download it. I won’t write an overview about it, ScottGu has already done an excellent job on his blog. You can also find more information on the extension’s page.

Consider the following code:

class Woot
{
    private static float PI;
    private static bool initialized = doInitialize();

    private static bool doInitialize()
    {
        if (!initialized)
        {
            var thread = new Thread(() => { PI = 3.14f; });
            thread.Start();
            thread.Join();
        }
        return true;
    }

    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(PI);
    }
}

What is the output of this program? Is it:

Badges are an integral part of the StackOverflow, which reward participants. According to Jeff Atwood, those are based on the Xbox 360 Achievement System.

Here’s an issue I’ve been struggling with: it seems that by accessing a certain property of a docked tool window of an add-in, an exception is thrown somewhere inside Visual Studio 2010. It’s caught internally, and the exception message, Object reference is not set to an instance of an object, is shown whenever I was trying to open any file (code or otherwise).

As I’m writing this, Dror Helper blogged about using a poor man’s performance profiler. This profiling technique is useful when the tools are lacking, and we need to measure a performance of method(s) within our code. This information is usually logged, and after a run we’re left with a huge file containing hundreds (and sometimes thousands of lines). How do we make sense of this mess? How do we filter out and understand the relevant performance information?

[November 16, 2010] While the information below is still very much relevant, please download the latest version of ReSharper from JetBrains website.

Have I mentioned that I love ReSharper? While patiently waiting for the 5.0 release to RTM, the team at JetBrains have shipped the Beta 2 release (build 1618). This is a very stable, very good improvement over the previous nightly builds.

Note: this is part 2. Read part 1 of the trip here.

Early Saturday morning on Islay, and we are set to go on another adventure! After eating a delicious breakfast that our lovely host prepared for us, we were set to try and explore some more distilleries. Unfortunately there were no tours at Lagavulin and Ardbeg on a Saturday, so we decided to drive to the place where one of my most favorite pictures was taken – the Carraig Fhada Lighthouse.

Every whisky lover gets, at some point, to experience whisky from the island of Islay in Scotland. This experience will be remembered throughout his life – it can be either love at first taste, or loathing for eternity. Not everybody can handle the intensity and the powerful peaty flavor of (most) Islay whiskies, some may even stop drinking whisky altogether. Others, like myself, fall in love with the flavor and rarely able to drink anything else.