Community developer blogs

Blood Sweat and Bugs

Recent Posts

• How to: Define Value Equality for a Type (C# Programming)

  Posted: 29 Jan 2009 at 14:18 by Benyamin Shoham

  When you define a class or struct, youdecide whether it makes sense to create a custom definition of valueequality (or equivalence) for the type. Typically, you implement valueequality when objects of the type are expected to be added to acollection of some sort, or when their primary purpose is to store aset of fields or properties. You can base your definition of valueequality on a comparison of all the fields and properties in the type,or you can base the definition on a subset. But in either

• Restart Firefox - A Great extension to use while developing Firefox Extensions

  Posted: 21 Jan 2009 at 19:52 by Benyamin Shoham

  While developing Firefox extensions you need to restart Firefox endlessly. Use this cool extension to do it from the File menu or Toolbar.Get Quick Restart.Long Description This simple extension adds a "RestartFirefox" item to the "File" menu. You can also use the Ctrl+Alt+Rkeyboard shortcut, or the included toolbar button.To use the toolbar button: right click on toolbar -> Customize... then drag the Restart button to the toolbar.Yes, very long...Reviews A necessary tool for developer

• Digg removed links to upcoming pages. Bug or Feature?

  Posted: 15 Jan 2009 at 19:21 by Benyamin Shoham

  I believe it was the last version that rolled out on December that first had this bug/feature. The upcoming pages of the specific categories does not have the once-were-links to "Most dugg" and "Most comments" pages of the specific category. Instead, if you click those buttons you get the "most" and "commented" pages of the "All topics" category.I would consider that a (poor) feature, unless the URLs of those links look like there is something broken. They are as they were, except that the categ

• How to resize the Firefox window with a bookmarklet

  Posted: 15 Jan 2009 at 11:20 by Benyamin Shoham

  Many developers work on large screens, but want to Preview web design in a 1024×768 browser screen.To resize the Firefox browser window to 1024 x 768 create a resizing bookmarklet.Creating a Resizing BookmarkletStep 1Right click on Bookmark Toolbar -> New Bookmark to launch the Bookmark dialog box.Step 2Insert the following into the box:Name: Give a descriptive name if you are planning to add several bookmarklet.Location: Place javascript:window.resizeTo(1024,768) into the textfield. Alter 10

• Using Custom Fields to create a dynamic sidebar

  Posted: 10 Jan 2009 at 20:34 by Benyamin Shoham

  WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data. This meta-data can include bits of information such as: Mood: Happy Currently Reading: Cinderella Listening To: Rock Around the Clock Weather: Hot and humid With some extra coding, it is possible to achieve more complex actions, such as using the metadata to store an expiration date for a post. Meta-data is handled with key/value pairs. The key is the

• How to Unlock a File in Team Foundation Server

  Posted: 08 Jan 2009 at 12:51 by Benyamin Shoham

  We've all been in thesituation before when a developer goes away for a long weekend (usuallyleaving on Thursday) and they forget to check in a file and ensure thesolution builds. Here is how to deal with that in TFS. Unlock thefile according to the instructions found here:http://blogs.msdn.com/rimuri/archive/2006/03/06/544686.aspxThe gist is that running this command will unlock the file:tf undo /workspace:TheirWorkspace;DOMAIN\TheirUserAccount $/path/to/fileTo get a list of workspaces run thi

• A User-Friendly C# Descriptive Statistic Class

  Posted: 08 Jan 2009 at 09:58 by Benyamin Shoham

  Today I found and used this class, I highly recommend it for simple statistics calculations required for many reporting systems.http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/DescriptiveStatisticClass.aspxThe author says:"The 80-20 rules applies: even with the advances of statistics, most of our work requires only univariate descriptive statistics – those involve the calculations of mean, standard deviation, range, skewness, kurtosis, percentile, quartiles, etc. This article describes a simple way to con

• Digg wins news industry sites comparison

  Posted: 19 Jun 2007 at 21:22 by Benny Shoham

  During the last 3 years there has been an enourmous shift in the news industry from classic news sites such as CNN.com and BBC.co.uk to web2.0 news site made of User generated content, such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. I checked these 5 sites on alexa to see how they do head to head.first I l

• Digg wins news industry sites comparison

  Posted: 19 Jun 2007 at 20:55 by Benyamin Shoham

  During the last 3 years there has been an enourmous shift in the news industry from classic news sites such as CNN.com and BBC.co.uk to web2.0 news site made of User generated content, such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. I checked these 5 sites on alexa to see how they do head to head.first I l

• Designing Business Objects for web2.0 Applications

  Posted: 18 Jun 2007 at 22:33 by Benny Shoham

  When we sit down at the beginning of the process to design our brand new shiny web2.0 application (Please, not another social network...) we should consider several issues regarding Object Oriented design in general, as well as web2.0 application specifically.Find your objectsThis is true for every

• Designing Business Objects for web2.0 Applications

  Posted: 18 Jun 2007 at 21:55 by Benyamin Shoham

  When we sit down at the beginning of the process to design our brand new shiny web2.0 application (Please, not another social network...) we should consider several issues regarding Object Oriented design in general, as well as web2.0 application specifically.Find your objectsThis is true for every

• Reporting Page Url from Flash video player = Monitization

  Posted: 13 Jun 2007 at 20:38 by Benny Shoham

  Recently the web got at least one more layer in the spaghetti of sites we are used to. Since the rising of the social networks and the User Generated Content sites everyone is providing the users with tools to embed parts of their web site in the user's blog, profile or other personalized web space.

• Reporting Page Url from Flash video player = Monitization

  Posted: 13 Jun 2007 at 20:10 by Benyamin Shoham

  Recently the web got at least one more layer in the spaghetti of sites we are used to. Since the rising of the social networks and the User Generated Content sites everyone is providing the users with tools to embed parts of their web site in the user's blog, profile or other personalized web space.

• The place of Intuition in the Development process

  Posted: 05 Jun 2007 at 19:21 by Benny Shoham

  I'm developing software for the last 10 years, and operating computers for 20. I have watched endless programmers, team leaders, project managers and CTOs bang their heads (or do other stupid things) with anger and frustration every time they observed the non-disputable fact of life that computers d

• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

  Posted: 05 Jun 2007 at 19:19 by Benny Shoham

  Check out the new Ajax controls from Microsoft, featured on CodePlex, their open source site. They have some neat solutions to tasks that we had some hard time doing before this toolkit came to be, and they are giving it away for free right now. On the site check out the live demo they have, it show

• The place of Intuition in the Development process

  Posted: 05 Jun 2007 at 18:16 by Benyamin Shoham

  I'm developing software for the last 10 years, and operating computers for 20. I have watched endless programmers, team leaders, project managers and CTOs bang their heads (or do other stupid things) with anger and frustration every time they observed the non-disputable fact of life that computers d

• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

  Posted: 31 May 2007 at 20:33 by Benyamin Shoham

  Check out the new Ajax controls from Microsoft, featured on CodePlex, their open source site. They have some neat solutions to tasks that we had some hard time doing before this toolkit came to be, and they are giving it away for free right now. On the site check out the live demo they have, it show

• Using JSON to connect Flash with Asp.Net

  Posted: 18 May 2007 at 16:59 by Benny Shoham

  Life of a programmer are becoming more and more simple when it comes to finding professional help online. Almost any question i have regarding my work, like how to do this, why that doesn't work, etc' I can always find the answer one google search away. Few clicks later i have an explenation, code s

• Using JSON to connect Flash with Asp.Net

  Posted: 18 May 2007 at 12:00 by Benyamin Shoham

  Life of a programmer are becoming more and more simple when it comes to finding professional help online. Almost any question i have regarding my work, like how to do this, why that doesn't work, etc' I can always find the answer one google search away. Few clicks later i have an explenation, code s

• Using JSON in AJAX based applications

  Posted: 09 May 2007 at 19:49 by Benny Shoham

  Who the hell is Json ?Ajax is a very popular way to create dynamic web2.0 style web pages. It is a method of making asynchronous Javascript calls from web pages to web servers, allowing web pages that refresh different parts of the page with server data without loading the whole page every time. Aja