Browse all blog posts by year and month
2019 4
February 1
Bandages off. A little sore and swollen. Time to get strong đŞ.
January 3
Recovery update - bandages are off, feeling a bit sore and swollen but ready to get back to building strength.
Meniscus fixed. On the road to recovery.
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.
2018 38
September 4
Soccer Sunday
Time to do a clean install of macOS toady. Canât login anymore.. just a black screen.
Pulled out some Protest the Hero this morning to fix all the things for arm64e!
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 talent when talent doesnât work hard.
August 2
RMBF. Resting mouth breather face.
On the way home from Whistler and the girls wanted to stop at Bobâs Burgers because you know⌠Bobâs Burgers. They are mad this is not the Bobâs Burgers. đ¤Śââď¸
July 9
Everybody wants to be number one. I have never talked to anyone and said âdo you want to be number 3?â and get a âYesâ. Not everyone is ready to do what it takes to be number one, this is where you...
The greatest emotional pendulum swing in 30 seconds. Hey coach, we just needed more room to throw the ball..
Perhaps this life is not my true life. This world not my true home. But she was. She always will be.
It wasnât over. It still isnât over.
I canât get this out of my head today âThe scariest thing about distance is that you donât know wether theyâll miss you or forget you.â
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 brother didnât take over, we opened the do...
Leaving this here for later⌠might be interesting to play with and see if it helps.
Even simple enough for me.
Sunday is recovery day. Why does Monday always feel like a grind?
June 2
Post workout coffee is the best. Especially after bike, burpees, power snatch and toe to bars.
Running UI tests is the new compiling⌠time to take a walk.
May 8
Mob Programming: How We Stumbled Upon and Learned to Love It
I might have to make a call today.
[Creating a Culture of Consistency]](https://naildrivin5.com/blog/2018/05/06/creating-a-culture-of-consistency.html):
The software engineerâs guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
Donât let them take you out if they think you are trash.
Todayâs mission if you accept it:
My creed. Learn it, love it, live it:
Being a good team mate should be the first requirement for any developer that is working on a team.
April 4
You know itâs a fun job, but still a job itunes.apple.com
I am not accident prone, I am a licensed gravity tester.
Music shifts your perspective⌠helps you see things differently. I love music.
Happy Easter!
March 3
Burpees for days
Sitting here watching Fringe and forgot that Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) was in the episode Subject 9.
Cousins and coffee.
February 4
Time to watch all the kids play. Love hearing everyone from elementary to high school.
I donât like to talk much about politics (although this shouldnât be political): I just donât understand how so many people can be pro-life then once that person is born, they are on their own. In ...
Days like these the phrase âLife is a rough sportâ really rings true.
After living in the Northwest for many years, you would think I was used to the grey and rainy days. Nope⌠hate them.
January 2
I will no longer refer to it as âMy Calendarâ and now refer to it as âMy Tetris Boardâ.
Sitting here watching the College Football Playoffs, I hear 21rst Century Schizoid Man being played by one of the bands. I said âWow! I am surprised to here that song, it is 48 years old.â. My olde...
2017 11
December 7
Sending out my Apple Watch for repair. Mic not working. Going to miss my activity streak and badges :(.
What I learned on this trip: sleeping on an air mattress is air at night, quicksand in the morning.
Sitting here in Galveston, TX thinking about all my people in the snow in Seattle. Cold and grey yet a great Christmas.
Merry Christmas you filthy animals!
I wonder if this Dominoâs pizza insurance thing has a clause for the 5 second rule.
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 the world.
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 the crossed.
November 3
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 bug that would always ask to give access...
Spent time last night fixing UWP symbolication issues in HockeyApp. Needs a little more love but things are working again. #partynightcoding
FaceID is awesome. TouchID is beastly⌠no longer can live like an animal.
October 1
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 phone. I ended up with a Nov 17th - 24th de...
2014 9
June 2
Swift and ReactiveCocoa seem like a perfect fit. Swift is designed with first-class functions and a succinct closure syntax, and ReactiveCocoa is all about implementing data flows using closures...
CodeLens Team Indicators - Processing Pipeline - Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management - Site Home - MSDN Blogs:
May 5
Expanding User-Defined Runtime Attributes in Xcode:
If you every wanted to know what I do everyday⌠this is it:
Code Lens for Git in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Update 3
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.Â
Dream Engine Blog:
February 2
XP is the Mac of Agile:
Useful Xcode Build Phases - Matthew Morey:
2013 12
September 1
ParisLemon â What A Difference Six Years MakesâŚ:
June 3
Since I am leaving Microsoft I decided to reset my Surface Pro to remove everything and start over. I had moved the restore partition to a USB drive earlier so I popped it in and reset. After going...
This is great adviseâŚ. even when it comes to software.
Anatomy Of A Good Commit Message
May 3
Danforth:
[A perspective: developers vs Microsoft ReactOS Project](http://www.reactos.org/node/637):Â
Every year I say I am going to WWDC and every year it passes and I say âNext year for sure.â. Â This year I decided it was time to put up or shut up. I did my best: I was ready at 10, logged in and ...
March 1
meganq:
January 4
A great list of potential problems with Objective-C code that goes beyond stylistic preferences to focus on objective code quality issues.
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 I have been working it out manually, yet...
Jonathan Sterling â Typed Collections with Self Types in Objective-C:
Note
2012 48
December 4
In our Hilo project we wrote TDD with lots of unit tests. The one thing we noticed is there were no good way to run tests that were asynchronous. Given that most everything in Windows 8 store apps ...
Overcoming Customer Inertia:
Simply Writing Tests Is Not Test Driven Development:
The patterns & practices Symposium 2013 is scheduled for January 15 â 17, on campus in Redmond. This is a great opportunity for you to connect and learn.
November 1
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 learned over the time. i must really sa...
September 3
One of the things I love about working in Visual Studio is the now we are shipping on a much more timely cadence. We are going to start sending out quarterly updates to Visual Studio. Â Another grea...
Sad to see this⌠another friend leaves the mothership: Leaving Microsoft.
Microsoft Developerâs First Flight:
August 2
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. One of the problems I know I have had in ...
Why canât we have this one back! This one rocked!
July 4
Agile for Startups:
This is cool stuff. If you have your own types and want to extend the debugger⌠this is for you. (Or if you are just a big nerd like me).
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 you want to know more about claims, read t...
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 worked on some great content with some great...
June 4
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 playing!
This is so cool!
I am getting old. Â 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:
I guess the cat is out of the bag or at least it is going to be so here is the post from Bob:
May 11
Agreeing with Peter Provost's take on unit testing private methods - don't do it. Focus on testing public interfaces instead.
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 and give feedback.
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.
Love the RSA Networks! The Power of Networks
I have long been a fan of Test Driven Development (TDD). I have used all kinds of frameworks for doing my tests and for all of them have adopted the Act, Arrange, Assert pattern. I have looked into...
Disable Home Button or Kiosk Mode
Jason Zanderâs blog post on Unit Testing mentioned our Hilo project doing unit testing for Metro Applications in C++.
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 interested in this. One of our awesome team me...
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 to make the final push before we call thi...
I am not a huge fan of the Windows Phone. It is a personal taste. I am not that into Metro. I keep seeing these things about being smoked by Windows Phone and it makes me sad. Are people really tha...
Silicon is eventually going to give up the ghost on how fast we can go.
April 7
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 would I want to do this. Most of the time, y...
Really cool post on Windows Azure Queues. This is something that would be easy to replace in our guidance on Windows Azure.
You are using Continuous Integration, Unit Tests and Code Coverage arenât you? If not, shame on you.
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 that C++ â11 makes using C++ much easier. ...
Iâll be there!
So many great things in here.. you have to watch it.
I was reading Alex Homerâs blog this morning (shame on you if you are not reading it), and it got me thinking: Do I still like to experiment?
March 2
It always takes a while for your project to go live on MSDN but it is alive⌠ALIVE!  We really put a lot of effort into this one and is the last in the series. You should go check it out.
Thinktecture.IdentityModel.* on GitHub
February 6
It is also for Single Responsibility Principle.
The guys at thinktecture have come up with a cool way for you to have your own STS in your application that is simple and lightweight. Â These guys review our Claims Identity Guide and I can say the...
This is the 3rd in our series of Windows Azure Guidance. This one is our release candidate and we should be done this week. There is a lot of post production to get the book done and onto MSDN, ye...
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 do this, but Geoff Cox from SouthWorks ...
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 learning this! I have watched both videos and ...
Jorge Rowies does it again. If you saw / liked the ACS Fluent Interface post, you will love to read how you can do the same thing for your API. Go read his new post and enjoy!
January 4
If you have a Windows Azure deployment, you owe it to yourself to check out Unified Logging for Windows Azure. Â If you worry about how you can monitor your application and what is going on in the c...
SouthWorks team created a fluent API for configuring Windows Azure ACS, making setup much cleaner than our previous rough setup program.
With the iOS Windows Azure Toolkit, you can use the ready made Windows Azure Packages that use ACS or Membership to manage users to Windows Azure Storage. These packages require you to have a SSL c...
My daughter was sucker punched on the bus after school.
2011 31
December 4
Simon Guest posted a way to extract your Facebook information from the ACS token. Â Now there is nothing wrong with how Simon did this, I am just updating the toolkit to add all the claims to the cl...
If you are interested in Claims Based Identity you have to check this out. Â I canât recommend this enough. I am really looking forward to the Azure release!
We have made some significant updates to the guidance. We have put everything into one solution with deep integration with Windows Azure Cache and Service Bus.
Windows Azure is a moving platform. Â When we first released these guides, the SDK was young and we decided we needed to refresh to support the latest 1.6 SDK. You can now get these from MSDN:
November 2
Today I just pushed a new version of the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS to github (tagged v1.3.0). These changes include new versions for the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS, the Configuration Utility...
A cool Windows Azure application that will tell you the latency between data centers. Check it out here.
October 1
We have been working on a new guide that is focusing on Hybrid Applications with Windows Azure. The focus is connecting on premise and off premise applications. The scenario focuses on a fictitious...
August 2
I have been working on the iOS toolkit for Windows Azure lately. We are really close to another release (check out the develop branch if you are interested in the changes). Nov 2-3 I will be speaki...
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 I have been working it out manually, yet...
July 4
Grigori and team have opened up voting on there Enterprise Library Windows Azure Integration Pack. Go vote to provide the direction they should take.
I have written quite a bit of articles on iOS and Mac applications using agile techniques (unit testing, continuous integration, etc) and in this post, I am going to put it all together. We will go...
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 that we shipped earlier this year.
A new Windows Azure end-to-end sample application that can be used locally, in Windows Azure or as a Hybrid application. If you are interested in enterprise technologies and Windows Azure I would r...
June 5
We are working on updates to our Developing Applications for the Cloud content. In the first version we used a feature from MVC Futures to simulate View State in our code so we didnât have to deal ...
We just finished our last bit of testing on these hands on labs. They are a great companion to the guide that we released last year as an RC. One of the things I am really excited about in these ha...
It was a long 2 weeks yet really fun. I had a great time in Atlanta and Slovenia and both conferences. Â I have posted the slides from both conferences here. I really enjoyed my time at both confere...
We just released our Release Candidate for the book that should be out in the next month. This is the second version of the original that includes new content on Single Sign Out, Windows Azure Acce...
April 6
We just posted another drop for the Claims Based Identity Guidance. This will be our last drop before we release. We would love any feedback. This new drop includes:
I was working on updating the TailSpin application to use Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) this week and ran into a small problem. Â I am using a WebClient in the controller to call back t...
The source for this is available on github.
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 previous version of Syntax Highlighter, so I...
I always love doing these online presentations. I posted the slides and a link to the recording for those that want to follow along. Thanks for the guys in Orlando for allowing me the time to speak.
One of the things I wanted to do after getting comfortable with the iOS/Mac platform(s) was trying to take my âagileâ ways to the platforms (for this post specifically testing). I started learning ...
March 1
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 Azure Access Control Service (ACS). We have...
February 5
Tom Hollander called me the other day looking for some advice on deployment scripts for Windows Azure. Given that I have not got around to updating these for the new SDK and commandlets, I decided ...
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 and enjoy!
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.
We are making good headway on our new project. We have started converting our current scenarios over to ACS. Eugenio has a couple of great posts on our first scenario using ACS as a Federation Pr...
Over the past year we have shipped a few guides:
January 1
After all the work we have done to ship the last 3 guides, we decided to go the extra mile and create some Hands On Labs (HOL) for each of the guides. These HOLs will guide you through development ...
2010 23
December 2
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 application and  made a version for Windows ...
Grigori posted the new backlog for Enterprise Library for Silverlight (so many found memories of Enterprise Library). Â Now you can vote for stories you would like to have in this edition. Â Your vot...
November 2
So I am back on the kick to get rid of cable. Â I donât really watch anything except the cooking channel and the occasional football game. I decided to sign up for Netflix since I can put this on al...
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 change your role configuration without upload...
October 2
3 screens and a cloud is alive. Â We have been working the past couple of months on a project that takes our Second Guide of Azure and adding a Windows Phone 7 client. Â We have done a lot of work on...
Grigori and team are looking for ideas to build an integration pack for Enterprise Library for Silverlight. If you are using Silverlight and Enterprise Library go fill out some comments and let the...
September 1
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.
July 1
Update 8/17/2010
June 2
It took a lot longer to get out than we hoped, but it is finally here. Part 1 is live (at least the landing page). If you have feedback, we would love to here it. You can post at our codeplex site....
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 that were failing when trying to start ...
May 1
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 started framing out the code for our project. ...
April 3
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 this code and make it work with the curr...
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.
In Part 1 I discussed how you could use msbuild + PowerShell to deploy your Windows Azure projects. Another thing you might need to deploy is your certificates for SSL etc. I figured that was the n...
March 5
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 through the Windows Azure portal and Visua...
Before I came back to Microsoft I was working at Thuzi, a social media company. One of the things Thuzi does is create facebook applications for businesses. Durning this time, a framework fell out ...
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 implementation (MusicStore) from the We...
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 taking feedback. This next week will foc...
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 my setup is I thought I would write it d...
February 3
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 year the talks are being held at buildi...
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 new platform. At patterns & practices...
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 version 1.0, I donât think any of us ever ...
January 1
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 and worked with a lot of great people. ...
2009 14
December 1
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 about assumptions.
October 1
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 samples built using MonoTouch and build th...
September 2
Last week I gave a talk at the Orlando .NET User Group on Practical Software Craftsmanship - 12 Practices to be a Better Developer. Most of these 12 are just things I have learned over my years of ...
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 sync issues while using MobileMe as you...
August 2
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 will miss. Things are quite different than ...
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 how you can solve this problem differentl...
July 1
Drew and I were having fun getting NHibernate working with WCF and Unity. I had built upon my brethren Jimmyâs code from this article to making a session per request. I had let Drew borrow the code...
June 3
After many long nights and to much Starbuckâs coffee, Kevin and I have finally done it. The waiting game is over and they announced today that we won! Go check out Impulse. I am still feverishly fi...
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 to do with code? Glad you asked. In the ...
âThereâs something very important I forgot to tell you. What? Donât cross the streams. Why? It would be bad. Iâm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, âbadâ? Try to imagine all li...
February 1
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 belt and try teaching in a new way. I a...
January 3
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 information. And Joe (aka Devfish) [Micro...
I submitted my highlighter to the project as a patch yet they havenât taken it yet. I am hoping that it gets in soon enough.. until then here it is :
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. Since then we have rented a home here....
2008 16
December 4
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 to see if it works with some random Objec...
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 legends about Aaron Hillegass and they all ...
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 Manning and his great post.
I spent the last month learning NHibernate and I am definitely a fan. I have been using SQLite for unit testing similar to Ayende in his post. The problem I ran into is that every time I ran my tes...
October 3
So far we have been doing what I do in most projects when I start, spiking some concepts. I canât say I have really time boxed myself on these because the wife and kids would probably not like the ...
Brad Wilson decided to tag me geek.
Chris Tavares and others have developed an abstraction layer for your IoC / Dependency Container. This will help building your applications easier and changing out your IoC container. This is reall...
September 8
In my last post I started putting together connecting my Mac to my WCF web service. I decided to make this into a series in the spirit of MVC Storefront. I needed a good name. I talked with jedi ab...
A while back I read Kevin Hoffmanâs blog attempting to connect to a WSDL Web Service and it didnât work out so well for him. I donât know if he got any further, yet I decided that I wanted to give ...
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 about it here. Big interwebs thanks to Craig!
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 inspect the running application. Get it a...
Customer, Company, Group / Team, Self: This is the order of operations.
When we first built the configuration editor for Enterprise Library, we always wanted the ability to have people build their own configuration elements that could be edited inside the tool. This wa...
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 Enterprise Library is MS-PL and they can put ...
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 going up in my room.
August 1
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 SimpleContainer we built. I first did this b...