Community developer blogs

Anders Norås' Blog

Recent Posts

• My Spotify "radio show"

  Posted: 12 Feb 2009 at 18:32 by andersnoras

  For a couple of weeks I've published playlists on Spotify. Until now they've been announced on my Twitter feed. This weeks "radio show" need a bit of explanation, so I decided to write a short blog post about it. My apologies to my readers who find this waaaaay off topic.I'm trying to change the theme of each "show", and this week I'm doing a tribute to The Blue Room which was an early morning radio show on BBC Radio 1 hosted by Rob Da Bank and Chris Coco. This show is one of my all time favorit

• Domain Specific Conlangs

  Posted: 03 Feb 2009 at 21:57 by andersnoras

  “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Georg

• What Makes a Good Programming Font?

  Posted: 22 Dec 2008 at 09:39 by andersnoras

  Last week I watched the feature-length documentary “Helvetica” about the typeface with the same name. If you care anything for graphic design, this film is highly recommended. It is awesome. Watching “Helvetica” got me thinking about what makes a good programming font. Jeff Atwood has been paying a lot of attention to this topic over the years and Keith Devens keeps a wiki guide to the world of monospaced fonts. Before the IT industry consumed me and turned me int

• We Won't Fix Your Crappy Code!

  Posted: 17 Dec 2008 at 21:38

  The last week has made me aware that many people have severe misconceptions about open source projects. The first example of this was Microsoft’s Oxite blog engine. This project is intended to give guidance on writing good ASP.NET MVC applications. Unfortunately it was a horrific example o

• Albums of The Year

  Posted: 12 Dec 2008 at 01:05

  Some time ago I posted my Christmas mixtape and it has been quite popular. In the wake of this, I thought I’d pick up a tradition from my previous blog and post my top twenty list released this year. I have a broad taste when it comes to programming languages, and my musical preferences are no

• Making The Most of What You've Got

  Posted: 11 Dec 2008 at 12:16

  For some time I've been caught between a rock and a hard place. In the project I'm working on I've got all sorts of constraints getting in my way. My left arm works with a big vendor product that has the capability to boil the ocean and an API to prove it, while my right builds a sensible domain mod

• One Size Doesn't Fit All

  Posted: 05 Dec 2008 at 11:50

  This is a petit I wrote for a book that didn't make it onto the bookshelves. It's a little different form what I usually write - I hope you'll enjoy it. “I don't get it.”, Nelson stood with his back against the whiteboard. -“This new technology should be much faster than a sys

• From All of Me, To All Of You

  Posted: 01 Dec 2008 at 12:11

  Its December and in the spirit of Christmas I thought I'd share something with you lot. I'm not an all out programming geek, I'm also a professional DJ. Or at least I used to be. These days I only do one gig a month, so I guess its fair to call it a hobby. For the last few years I've put together

• C# 4.0 - Why Dynamic Binding and Extension Methods Don't Mix

  Posted: 05 Nov 2008 at 13:35

  For generations, the C# programming language has adopted ideas from dynamic languages and introduced clever ways to achieve similar features while still being a statically typed language. In C# 3.0 extension methods were introduced and while not being the exact same thing, extension methods resemble

• C# 4.0 - Covariance and contra-variance

  Posted: 29 Oct 2008 at 00:02

  When Anders Heljberg unveiled C# 4.0 we got introduced to many new and cool language features. I’d been expecting some of them and I beat myself for not thinking of some of the others. A features that took me by surprise was the support for covariance and contra-variance in the language. Judging by

• Visitor Revisited

  Posted: 22 Oct 2008 at 21:19

  When I was actively working on my Quaere project, I experienced a real slowdown in productivity when I got to the more complex processing of its expression trees. The main reason for this was that the visitor implementation we used for this grew very large over time. Below you can see the interface

• Logical not Physical, Few not Many, Just Do It

  Posted: 20 Oct 2008 at 23:21

  In both my “Better Domain Driven Design” and “Want SOA? Throw out your Web Services!” talks I’ve referred to the “Onion Architecture” as a mean for controlling your dependencies. The term was coined by Jeffery Palermo in his series of blog posts on it.. This

• Using Oblique Strategies for Difficult Refactoring

  Posted: 15 Oct 2008 at 20:58

  Last year I wrote a lengthy guide from the trenches on how we can make unmaintainable code better. Lately I’ve often found myself caught between a rock and a hard place, doing my best to make the best out of untestable, incomprehensible stacks of code. As Bill Pierce pointed out in the comments to m

• Watch My JavaZone Talk

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 21:30 by andersnoras

  Back in September I gave a talk entitled “Better Domain Driven Design” at the JavaZone conference in Oslo. The recording of that talk is now available on the JavaZone web site. Just click the “Presentation” link on this page to watch it. Unfortunately my super cool opening t

• My Souped Up Visual Studio

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 21:04 by andersnoras

  Lars Wilhelmsen just wrote up a list of the stuff he’s got going in his tricked out Visual Studio 2008 installation. He tagged me, so here is the lowdown of what I’m rolling with. I’ve always tried to stick to a few tools that I know well rather than running amok with add-ins. Hence there are few su

• Simplify and Exaggerate

  Posted: 14 Sep 2008 at 12:54 by andersnoras

  Today’s best sellers in the world of business books are not like they were a decade ago. While the most influential writers had their background from magazines like The Harvard Business Review some years ago, today they’re more likely to write for The New Yorker or Wired. Writers like Ma

• BDDD: You underestimate the power of Generics

  Posted: 10 Sep 2008 at 12:10 by andersnoras

  JavaZone is only one week away. This year I'll be doing a talk how we can improve our designs to achieve better separation between business and infrastructure concerns. These teasers have been leaked to YouTube a while ago, but with just one week to go, time has come to bring them to the masses. So

• The Anders Norås Guide to Weird Computer Science

  Posted: 08 Sep 2008 at 20:30 by andersnoras

  Last weekend I met with Johannes for a couple of beers at Mono. As always, our discussions got quite esoteric and one of the things we talked about was weird computer science books. If you’re anything like me, you steer away from the mass produced “Teach yourself something in 24 hours” titles and he

• COP, C# 4.0 and doing open source stuff

  Posted: 28 Aug 2008 at 14:25 by andersnoras

  Quite a few .NET based Composite Oriented Programming spikes have surfaced in the wake of my humble COP spike last week. I was by no means the first to implement this concept on .NET and most of the other spikes were written long before I posted mine. As far as I know Fredrik Kalseth was first to th

• Qi# source code

  Posted: 25 Aug 2008 at 12:55 by andersnoras

  My quick and dirty Composite Oriented Programming spike seems to have gotten quite some attention around the blogosphere, so I better keep my promise and publish the source code. The source code can be downloaded from http://andersnoras.com/files/folders/code/entry595.aspx. Please keep in mind that