20 Years of Code

Sometime around now, some 20 years back, I had my first gig as a “professional” coder. A friend of mine put me in contact with somebody who wanted to allow those that had coding certifications (like a Microsoft MVP) to build a basic profile, upload the all important “badge” image they received, and have a nice looking single page “resume” to share and connect. Maybe I built the first LinkedIn, but I won’t necessarily claim that [:: smiles ::]. However, I did learn the most important lesson that sticks with me today. It has also been a wild ride in software…

Digital Whittling

So this cool thing happened this morning…

On the Joys of MVC Architecture

As part of the goals for 2016, one of them is to “reface” my Prayer Journal app using the Angular Material library provided by Google. In the process of doing this, I’ve come to appreciate (yet again) the joys of building things using MVC architecture.

Review: Windows PowerShell Cookbook, 3rd Edition

I’ve become an increasing fan of Windows PowerShell. It’s additional use of variables, scripts, and libraries opens up doors to some powerful scripting options that I need. I’m working on creating some deployment scripts for web applications I maintain across various web servers, and simple batch files wouldn’t fit the bill. Having worked a little bit with PowerShell, I really needed something that would provide a reference guide for all the tasks I wanted to accomplish. I also needed to learn a bit more about the fundamental concepts and features of PowerShell itself. Windows PowerShell Cookbook, 3rd Edition by Lee Holmes provides  that provides the examples and reference guide necessary for nearly all of my PowerShell needs.

A Fresh Perspective: Two Years and Counting as a Remote Worker

Time flies when you’re having some Fresh fun! This week I’ve started my second year with Fresh Consulting as a remote worker. This has been my first foray into remote working, so I’ve been documenting some milestones/tips along the way.  While my first year seemed to be a huge eye opening experience in the way the private sector work, technologies to work with, and projects to work on, this year seemed a lot more focused.

Refactored: Creating dynamic/configurable parameterized queries in Entity Framework

A little while back I posted about a technique I was using to setup parameterized queries using Entity Framework. I had posted to the .Net group on Google+ and received some amazing feed back from Dan Nemec and Chris McCall and refactored the code. It’s cleaner, easier to work with, and hopefully a bit more optimized too. Here’s what’s different.

Creating dynamic/configurable parameterized queries in Entity Framework

EDIT: A better, refactored version of this can be found here.

Entity Framework is an amazing tool. It allows you to quickly and easily get your basic queries and updates running with little hassle. In addition, you have business objects to interact with, which makes your middle tier (or your controller) that much easier to work with. However, when you need to start setting up more dynamic queries from user input, things start to get tricky. Here’s a solution I created to help with that.

Introducing Quote-a-Dillie-O Alpha!

What do you do when the family goes to bed early and you have a hankering to code? Write an app that will dynamically render your old tagline code as an image for use in your GMail signatures! Then you share it for the world to use!

Amazing Fun with Ruby on Rails and Zurb Foundation

Look ma! The same app on three platforms seamlessly!

A few weeks back a friend of mine asked me to create a game timer that he could use at the local game / comic shop. Since the options were open, I used this opportunity to try out new web technology for me (Ruby on Rails) as well as dig deeper with a presentation framework I really like (Zurb Foundation). It was nothing short of amazing fun!

Review: Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition

I’ll never forget the day I came across regular expressions. I was a year out of college and at my first “big” job at a major University and I ran into a challenge where I needed to detect the status of destination of packages arriving on campus based on a special reference code that was attached to the packages. While there were a large amount of options that made hard coding the processing undesirable, the format of the reference code was easy to discern. From here I discovered that regular expressions allowed me to get my location, floor, and sometimes room in two or three simple lines of code. Since then I’ve always tried to keep somewhat up to par on my regular expression proficiency. That is why I was really excited to come across Regular Expressions Cookbook, 2nd Edition by Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan that provides everything I need to work with Regular Expressions.