All Posts

This page contains an archive of all posts on this blog, organized by date.

2019

Bandages Off

Recovery update - bandages are off, feeling a bit sore and swollen but ready to get back to building strength.

Recovery

Meniscus fixed. On the road to recovery.

Chatty Ghosts

How is it that I have so many messages to go through after the holiday? Everyone says this place is a ghost town… these ghosts really have a lot to say.

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2018

A Black Screen

Time to do a clean install of macOS toady. Can’t login anymore.. just a black screen.

Pulled Out Some

Pulled out some Protest the Hero this morning to fix all the things for arm64e!

Your Talent Is

Your talent is your greatest nemesis when it comes to your mindset. You have to edit your behavior and work. Talent only gets you so far: hard work beats tal...

Bob’s Burgers

On the way home from Whistler and the girls wanted to stop at Bob’s Burgers because you know… Bob’s Burgers. They are mad this is not the Bob’s Burgers. 🤦‍♀️

Number One

Everybody wants to be number one. I have never talked to anyone and said “do you want to be number 3?” and get a “Yes”. Not everyone is ready to do what it t...

Emotional Pendulum Swing

The greatest emotional pendulum swing in 30 seconds. Hey coach, we just needed more room to throw the ball..

Not My True Life

Perhaps this life is not my true life. This world not my true home. But she was. She always will be.

Is it Over?

It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.

Fahrenheit 451

Watching Fahrenheit 451 and the strong correlation to today makes me sad. It makes me sad for all the books they have already banned in schools today. Big br...

Sunday Monday

Sunday is recovery day. Why does Monday always feel like a grind?

Post Workout Coffee

Post workout coffee is the best. Especially after bike, burpees, power snatch and toe to bars.

I am not Trash

Don’t let them take you out if they think you are trash.

Being a Good

Being a good team mate should be the first requirement for any developer that is working on a team.

Still a Job

You know it’s a fun job, but still a job itunes.apple.com

I Am Not

I am not accident prone, I am a licensed gravity tester.

Sitting Here Watching

Sitting here watching Fringe and forgot that Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) was in the episode Subject 9.

Time to Watch

Time to watch all the kids play. Love hearing everyone from elementary to high school.

Life is a TRAP

I don’t like to talk much about politics (although this shouldn’t be political): I just don’t understand how so many people can be pro-life then once that pe...

Grey and Rainy

After living in the Northwest for many years, you would think I was used to the grey and rainy days. Nope… hate them.

My Tetris Board

I will no longer refer to it as ‘My Calendar’ and now refer to it as ‘My Tetris Board’.

21st Century Schizoid Man

Sitting here watching the College Football Playoffs, I hear 21rst Century Schizoid Man being played by one of the bands. I said “Wow! I am surprised to here ...

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2017

Apple Watch Repair

Sending out my Apple Watch for repair. Mic not working. Going to miss my activity streak and badges :(.

Air Mattress

What I learned on this trip: sleeping on an air mattress is air at night, quicksand in the morning.

Galveston

Sitting here in Galveston, TX thinking about all my people in the snow in Seattle. Cold and grey yet a great Christmas.

Domino’s Pizza

I wonder if this Domino’s pizza insurance thing has a clause for the 5 second rule.

Holiday Travel

Holiday traveling is always interesting. Flights overbooked and offering 400 US to change. I wonder how many times you can change and collect a ticket around...

Crossing the Street

Really wish people crossing the street in the morning did not were all black in the rain. The only thing I could see was the light coming from their phone as...

Finding Loaded Frameworks in macOS

I have been sitting on this for a while. After starting back at Microsoft, I work on HockeyApp which includes the HockeyApp macOS application. The app had a ...

UWP symbolication

Spent time last night fixing UWP symbolication issues in HockeyApp. Needs a little more love but things are working again. #partynightcoding

FaceID is Awesome

FaceID is awesome. TouchID is beastly… no longer can live like an animal.

Ordered my iPhone X

Ordered my iPhone X. Took me a while because I was in San Fransico where the caching for the store was bad because everyone there were trying to get the pho...

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2014

A Swift Reaction

Swift and ReactiveCocoa seem like a perfect fit. Swift is designed with first-class functions and a succinct closure syntax, and ReactiveCocoa is all abou...

Iron Foundry V2

For the last several months I have been working on an extension with Cloud Foundry V2 that allows users to deploy Windows / .NET applications: Iron Foundry. 

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2013

My First WWDC

Every year I say I am going to WWDC and every year it passes and I say “Next year for sure.”.  This year I decided it was time to put up or shut up. I did my...

Build Numbers, Tags, Releases: Oh My!

Working on a Mac / iOS projects, I have been trying to come up with an easy way to bump versions when it goes out the door for testing or production. Mostly ...

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2012

p&p Symposium 2013

The patterns & practices Symposium 2013 is scheduled for January 15 – 17, on campus in Redmond. This is a great opportunity for you to connect and learn.

The Windows 8 C++ Hilo Team

My last hurrah at patterns & practices was the C++ Windows 8 app Hilo. It made it into the Windows SDK. It is amazing how much we got done and how much I...

Microsoft’s New Logo

One of the things my team worked on for Visual Studio 2012 is the Video feature. The idea is to give you a good introduction into a specific feature in VS. O...

ClaimsPrincipal Everywhere

Oh happy days! Every principal is derived from ClaimsPrincipal in .NET 4.5. This makes all the work on the book we did that much more relevant now.  So if yo...

Moving On (Again)

It must be that time of year. I have been at patterns & practices for a couple of years again and it has been awesome. Since I have been back I have work...

SQLite for Window 8

I have been really waiting for this one. With release 3.7.13 we get support for WinRT and building your Windows Store apps. Time to start compiling and playi...

Stop Visual Studio Yelling at You

I am getting old.  I really like Visual Studio, but I am not a fan of the new all caps mode in the menu bar. If you want to stop yelling at you:

Another Hilo Drop

Last night we made another Hilo drop. This is the latest greatest code and tests. We are getting close and the code is getting better. Go download the latest...

API Design Rules

Matt Gemmell is an awesome developer and has written a great guide for Api Design Rules for iOS and OS X. I would argue that you could apply these anywhere.

Hilos and Unit Testing in C++

Jason Zander’s blog post on Unit Testing mentioned our Hilo project doing unit testing for Metro Applications in C++.

Hilo, C++, and PPL

We are making heavy use of the Parallel Programming Library in Native Code. I really love this. After our PPL books from last year, I have really been intere...

Another Hilo Release

We have done some major work on Hilo to get things in better shape. Right now we are waiting on the next release of Windows 8 and Visual Studio coming soon t...

When am I ever going to use this?

There was a question on stackoverflow on how to write an iOS app purely in C. Of course, anything is possible given time and money. The question is, why woul...

Hilo for Windows 8 - C++ and XAML

The original Hilo is a C++ application for Windows 7 using Win 32 and Direct X. Now with the introduction of Windows 8, C++ is making a comeback. It helps th...

Feeding My Need to Experiment

I was reading Alex Homer’s blog this morning (shame on you if you are not reading it), and it got me thinking: Do I still like to experiment?

Style Cop: The Effective Way

We use Style Cop to keep everyone honost  on our projects. It make it easy and integrates pretty well with ReSharper. I have never stopped to write up how we...

NSScreenCast

Ben Scheirman has started NSScreencast, a great set of screen casts on Objective-C and iOS / Mac development. I really wish this was around when I was learni...

Unified Logging for Windows Azure

If you have a Windows Azure deployment, you owe it to yourself to check out Unified Logging for Windows Azure.  If you worry about how you can monitor your a...

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2011

Thinktecture IdentityServer v1.0

If you are interested in Claims Based Identity you have to check this out.  I can’t recommend this enough. I am really looking forward to the Azure release!

Build Numbers in Xcode

Working on a Mac / iOS projects, I have been trying to come up with an easy way to bump versions when it goes out the door for testing or production. Mostly ...

Windows Azure Samples Online

If you really like straight forward simple feature examples, this is the place to get them. You can download them here. They even list some the books / code...

Objective-C Syntax Highlighter Reboot

I really like Syntax Highlighter. I like when the code is put in a pre tag and looks like something from the IDE. I had an Objective C highlighter for a prev...

Claims Identity V2 Drop 2 Ready for You

As normal I am late to the party. We have been working hard on getting the Claims Identity Guide updated for a V2. Our big focus for this drop is Windows Azu...

A Survival Guide to Scrum

My friend Mitch Lacy has been working on a book and is looking for feedback. If you ever wanted a survival guide to scrum, this is it. Go read, give feedback...

Come work with us at p&p

Ever wanted to change the world? You too could come and enjoy the fun we have every day. If you think you would like to do this go apply here.

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2010

Windows Phone 7 Developer Guidance

Yesterday we released our guidance on Windows Phone 7.  This is a continuation of our Windows Azure Guidance that we did previously.  We took the survey appl...

Enterprise Library for Silverlight

Grigori posted the new backlog for Enterprise Library for Silverlight (so many found memories of Enterprise Library).  Now you can vote for stories you would...

Software Still Sucks and I Am Stupid

So I am back on the kick to get rid of cable.  I don’t really watch anything except the cooking channel and the occasional football game. I decided to sign u...

Protecting Your Config in Windows Azure

Ever since we have done Windows Azure Guidance, we have not had a story for securing the web config in the cloud. If you want to be able to be able to chang...

Azure Guidance Part 2 Out Now

Go get it while it is hot. Our second version of our Azure Guidance is available on the web. The book should be available soon.

There can be only One RoleEntryPoint

Last week we were finalizing the production of Windows Azure Architecture Guidance Part 1, when we came across a problem with the code. We had a few machines...

How a Checkbox Saved Paving My Machine

Last week we started working on the code for part 2 of our Windows Azure Architecture Guidance. Eugenio has a great writeup of our start to Part 2. We starte...

Paging with Windows Azure Table Storage

Steve Marx has a great post on paging over data that uses the Storage Client Library shipped with previous versions of the Windows Azure SDK. You can update ...

Speaking at ALT.NET Houston

As posted by Ben Scheirman, I will be speaking at Alt.NET Houston on Windows Azure. I will be doing a workshop on Friday. Come and Get You Head in the Cloud.

Azure Deployment for your Build Server

One of the more mundane tasks when working with Azure is the deployment process. There are APIs that can help deploy your application without having to go th...

Enterprise Library 5 on Azure

We spent some time in our first few weeks of the project getting Enterprise Library 5 (Beta 2) working on Azure. The first thing we did is took the reference...

Azure Guidance: Our First Release

After our first week, we have the baseline application that we will be converting to Azure in our first scenario. The site is live and we are ready to start ...

My azure setup

The first thing I did to get started on our new Azure Guidance project is setup the environment. Since I always seem to forget or people keep asking me what ...

Seattle Code Camp Talks

It is time for Seattle Code Camp again. There are plenty of great talks and if you are in the area you should go vote for the ones you will want to see. This...

Getting Our Heads in the Cloud

This week we start working on our Azure Guidance project. Many customers are looking to move to Azure and need good guidance on how to make the move to the n...

Enterprise Library: A History

With the release of Enterprise Library 5.0 beta 1 (including Unity 2.0) I thought I would give a (somewhat) brief history of the project. When we released ve...

That Was A Really Long Vacation

In May it will be 2 years that I have been in the Sunshine State (Florida). I am going back to Seattle and Microsoft at the beginning of February. I have met...

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2009

Technical Debt

I am always amazed when people look at me weird when I mention Technical Debt. I thought this was a universal understanding. Well, you know what they say abo...

MonoTouch Comparison with Apple Tools

I have been playing around with MonoTouch trying to figure out if I liked the new approach to building Cocoa Touch apps. I decided to take a couple of the sa...

OmniFocus Sync Fix

I use OmniFocus on my phone and laptop to keep myself organized. I have had to look this up a couple of times so I thought I would put it up here. If you get...

Time to Move On (again)

As of September 11th the Mouse (Disney) and I are parting ways. It was a good ride just not the place for me. It was a blast and I met many people that I wil...

Singletons Are Evil Part 2

A while back I wrote a post about why singletons are evil. I still agree with that statement, yet after my comment on twitter today, I think I need to show h...

Unity Lifetime Managers for WCF

Drew and I were having fun getting NHibernate working with WCF and Unity. I had built upon my brethren Jimmy’s code from this article to making a session per...

newCloudApp(): Grand Prize Winner

After many long nights and to much Starbuck’s coffee, Kevin and I have finally done it. The waiting game is over and they announced today that we won! Go che...

This Code For Rent

Given the current economy and the housing market here in Florida, we have been talking a lot about renting versus owning a home. How does this have anything ...

Don’t Cross the Streams

“There’s something very important I forgot to tell you. What? Don’t cross the streams. Why? It would be bad. I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What d...

My First Journey into BDD

Lately I have been trying to teach people TDD and running into the usual suspects of misconceptions. I decided that maybe it was about time to update my tool...

TDDFireStarter in Tampa

Wanted to give a big shout out to the guys putting on this event. Scott, Sean, the guys from Blue Spire (along with others) did a great job presenting this i...

My Town

In May of last year I moved from Seattle to Florida. For about the first 2 months I lived in temporary housing in a condo in a little town called Celebration...

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2008

Objective-C / Cocoa Syntax Highlighter

Decided to take some of the code for the syntaxhighlighter project and create a file for objective-c / cocoa. Going to be making a few updates to this post t...

Lead the Herd, Be the Nerd

The week of November 17th I decided to do something crazy: I decided to dive into Objective-C and Cocoa at the Big Nerd Ranch. I had heard many myths and leg...

Updating Diff/Merge in VSTS

I am tired of looking up this post every time I repave my machine. So here it is, the definitive list of tools and how to configuration them. Thanks to James...

Sudo

I really love running as a non admin, although I really miss sudo from Unix. No longer, the smart peeps at PluralSight do it again with Su Do. Read more abou...

Snoop - A cool WPF Utility

When I was doing WPF back in the day, I used a very cool and useful tool called Snoop. This tool shows you the visual tree of your application and help you i...

DSL for Configuration - CSD

When we first built the configuration editor for Enterprise Library, we always wanted the ability to have people build their own configuration elements that ...

Enterprise Library on Mono

With my new fascination with the Mac platform, I have been playing with Mono and Cocoa. I just read this morning that Miguel de Icaza just noticed that Enter...

Space Invaders Invaded My Room

The wife knows how much I love my video games so she sent me some wall paper based on Space Invaders. When we finally get our new house, this is definitely g...

What is in a Parameter Name

I have been working on an extension to Unity for a while to do interception. It is basically a port that Brad Wilson and I did for ObjectBuilder and the Simp...

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