Tim’s Blog
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Understanding Types in .Net Part 1: var keyword
It’s surprising to me how many developers don’t understand the .Net type system. So I decided to write a series of posts on of some of the misconceptions. The “var” keyword, introduced in C# 3 is implicit typing. For all intents and purposes, this is the same as strong typing. It is strongly typed at […]
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Why Clint Eastwood is My Programming Hero
This post has been stewing for a while. I’ve struggled for a way to describe the needless clash I see between the communities I work in. But I think I’ve found my analogy. Ever watch a Clint Eastwood Western? Not Dirty Harry, or any the modern-setting movies he’s been directing lately, but the Westerns. In […]
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Listener in Oracle 11g
I am working on a project that uses Oracle 11g, and we were standing up a db for proof of concept in one of the dev environments. I configured listener.ora to point to the instance, but still was having connection problems. Apparently in your init file, you need the line: local_listener=’MySidName’ To make sure it […]
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My Kindle Experience So Far
I’ve now read 2 books on my Kindle, David Maister’s Managing The Professional Service Firm and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Reading Maister’s book helped highlight some of the features of the kindle. The ability to highlight snippets of text for later, and take simple notes added to the experience. However, it’s worth noting if you’re a […]
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Rake Breathing New Life to Building Old Projects
I’ve seen lots of examples of rake (the ruby make replacement) being used as a build tool in non-ruby projects. Many of these are still modern platforms, like .Net. For example, StructureMap builds with rake. But I’ve found that even on older platforms, the power of having a full programming language in your build tool […]
Got any book recommendations?