Tim Hoolihan

I’ve been reading Jon Stokes’ Inside the Machine, and it’s a very good read. In particular I was struck by a couple of simple aspects of how CPUs work. ISA First, let’s discuss ISAs (instruction set architecture). x86 is a famous one created by Intel. POWER is an ISA created by IBM. PowerPC was created [...]

If you use NuGet, and only check-in your packages.config files to source control, then your source control repository will stay smaller, and checkout faster. Checking in binaries is usually a nice thing to avoid. However, you need new developers to be able to get those libraries locally easily, and to allow your build server (continuous [...]

I had to create a stored procedure to be called from NHibernate. You could use Session.Connection to execute with ADO.Net, but I like the idea of staying in NHibernate for consistency. Anyway, I found a lot of documentation on how to call one, but not with a parameter, so I thought I’d document that here. [...]

According to Wikipedia, Single Source of the Truth “refers to the practice of structuring information models and associated schemata, such that every data element is stored exactly once” (emphasis is mine). This would mean, for example, a customer’s first name to be stored in once repository, not in every system that refers to the customer. [...]

One or my recent projects was to work with a client to create a Silverlight control for reporting purposes that has some general flashiness, and is reusable across several sections of the site. It has brushed into some interesting areas. I have used Silverlight for some media and imaging applications before, but this was the [...]

I find myself more and more involved in the sales process with my company. And while our primary focus is on expertise around technology and information, the team I sell for most does work using Agile methodologies. It’s not the primary aspect of our sale though, as people want to hear about our proposed solution, [...]

In a tough economy, jobs can be hard to find. Especially the right jobs, ones that make you happy and help you grow in your career. Even if you are satisfied with your job, having a network of programmers, managers, and other IT professionals is a great thing. You have people to bounce ideas off [...]

I’ve been reading Rocky Lhotka’s Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book. CSLA is a bit of a polarizing framework. A lot of comments on the book are along the lines of “outlived it’s usefulness given the current framework updates” or just generally “not keeping up with modern software trends.” It should also be noted that [...]

How will this new software handle: Authentication Authorization Exceptions Instrumentation Persistence Object/Data Distribution Business Intelligence Team Turnover Quality Assurance Increased Load Validation This is a work in progress. Suggestions?

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 [...]