Author Archives: simon

Today, I had a problem of how to construct an object passing a specific date into the constructor. Normally, this is not an issue encountered frequently as only “services” are passed via constructor injection. This time however, I needed to … Continue reading →

Here is a quick sample showing how it is possible to create a flexible resizeable layout in WPF with a GridSplitter. Here we see how you can change the size of panes in a vertical and horizontal direction. And the … Continue reading →

For some reason, I have ignored the NUnit syntax around Assert.That up to now. I thought it was one of these experiments around a fluent interface which didn’t offer any advantages over the existing API. I wanted to write a … Continue reading →

I am making a concerted effort to really *learn* javascript at the moment. There are a load of great resources out there. Here is the beginnings of a list: Douglas Crockford’s Home Page JavaScript Garden – advanced topics Learn JavaScript … Continue reading →

Everyone probably knows this already, but it’s probably easy to miss as *stuff now just works*. Contravariance, or covariance is now improved to make working with generics that little bit simpler. The following code now compiles fine in .net 4, … Continue reading →

So, I’ve set up my console how Scott Hanselman recommended. This is how I managed to get Cygwin to work correctly as a shell. You just need to set your shell to: %cygwin-path%\bin\bash.exe –login -i

Ok, again – this isn’t really ground breaking or anything, but if you have a load of dependencies that you need to copy at build time to your bin folder, this is a nice script that goes into the pre-build … Continue reading →

Sometimes, in .net it can get a bit confusing about which interface you need to implement for to get object equality to work correctly. When using the Distinct extension method in Linq, IEqualityComparer<T> is very useful var items = new … Continue reading →

A little bit of unix command knowledge can often save a stack of time even on a windows box. This little snippet was really useful when I was trying to find out which file a function was declared in: find … Continue reading →

Some rough notes about my investigations into different techniques to perform batch database updates. It’s not efficient to send individual queries from an application to the database server. What techniques can be used from .net to send batch updates? ETL … Continue reading →