http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog A decade of Delphi, a little less .NET Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:43:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A typical DBA concern in larger shops is that once stored procedures no longer figure (or at least, are used where they are genuinely needed rather than as a mandate), they have no way of knowing what kind of NH-generated SQL might cause problems in production. A while ago ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=82 In my last post, I bemoaned the fact that WCF and ReST are still strange bedfellows and that the ReST starter kit, while promising, was still in no way ready for prime time. Although a new preview release was uploaded last October, the license is still for preview software ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=45 I've been wanting to work with WCF for a fairly long time. I suppose I could have flirted with burnout and done it on top of my daily paying activities, but I like to think my health's improved with not doing this kind of thing. In any case, ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=44 NB - this has sat in my "you didn't publish this, doofus" folder for some time now. It still seems relevant, so here - for the benefit of my three readers - it is: A confession - I've come to the multi monitor thing rather late. For five years ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=40 I've been having a play with Ubiquity today. It shows a lot of promise and is a nice thing to use - both from a command user point of view and the point of view of a command author. It's great that they've baked jQuery right in too. ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=43 Andres wrote a nice summary of his experiences with a MacBook Pro as a Windows development machine. I agree with everything he's got to say, really - it's a lovely machine but it's not really suited to Windows development (I set aside only a 60GB partition for Windows XP, ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=41 Giles Bowkett turned up in my Reddit feed today with a thought-provoking article: Programmer Interviews: Two Warning Signs. He says: "But the ability to locate reference materials isn't an important criterion in hiring programmers; it's an important criterion in hiring librarians." As I commented over there about a nanosecond before ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=38 Does anyone else think that C# 3.0's var keyword and its concomitant type inference (see the LINQ Preview if you've no idea what I'm rattling on about) is in some circumstances pointlessly clever syntactic sugar? Yes, it's a necessary keyword for ad-hoc projections of data for which you have ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=36 It's not the fact that you can query XML documents in-memory using a SQL-like syntax (hey, I already had XPath, thanks all the same). It's the fact that you can now create an XML document, for use in an example, where the C# code structure used to create the document mirrors ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=37 I've got Jeff Atwood to thank for an awful lot of things he posts over at Coding Horror, but this post in particular has made my day. I've often wondered why it is that the Find/Replace RegEx engine built into the VS.NET IDE uses a wilfully different RegEx flavour ... http://www.zephyros-systems.co.uk/blog/?p=35