http://blog.brianhartsock.com The exciting life of a software developer and nerd Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:01:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Matt: I wonder if SPAM is good, I have never had it before (while holding up a can of SPAM). Me: Ya, haven't you ever fried SPAM before? Matt: Only at the gateway level. Oh the joys of working for an email company. http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/08/19/worst-email-joke-ever/ I downloaded Amazon's Unbox this weekend to watch some BSG (yes I am a nerd). Unbox is Amazon's video download service. I say service because it is much more than just another download. Amazon allows me to re-download videos or transfer them to multiple machines. Obviously, ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/08/11/amazon-unbox/ Today I found some odd behavior when working with LINQ. It is hard to describe, so here is the code. public void Foo(IEnumerable strings) { IEnumberable stringsInDb = strings.Where(s => this.QueryTheDbAndTakeALongTime(s)); foreach(string str in stringsInDb) { //Where clause in LINQ is actually executed } foreach(string str in stringsInDb) { //Where clause in LINQ is actually executed AGAIN } } Luckily, ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/08/07/linq-bites-back/ Today I was thinking, and I realized something odd. My development computer is Windows. My personal computer is Ubuntu. Weird huh? http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/07/26/switcheroo/ Every developer has heard the phrase document your code. The reason this is important is the functionality is now coupled with a description of how it works. Now a future developer can load up a single source of information and understand the functionality. But, more importantly, ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/07/26/code-your-documents/ Continuous Integration is an easy read that anyone directly involved in the software development process could gain a lot from. Even though it doesn't really introduce anything new, it ties everything most developers have learned over time into a single process, called continuous integration. Here are a few ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/07/18/book-review-continuous-integration/ I am doing some home wiring at my parents house and Googled around for some info on wiring phone jacks. I came across this page, which strangely reminded me of my first website on Geocities 13 years ago. It was a website on Duke Nukem, and made heavy use ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/07/10/geocities-nostalgia/ I just used LINQ for the first time ever in code. Pretty exciting. For me, it doesn't get much better than transforming some mundane 6 liner into an elegant one liner. This... int count = 0; foreach (string email in this.emails) { if (email.EndsWith("@mydomain.com")) count++; } return count; becomes this... return this.emails.Count(email ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/07/08/linqd-up/ I have been meaning to buy an external hard-drive to backup a lot of my data. Well, today I decided to try out Amazon S3 as my storage medium instead of an external hard-drive. JungleDisk has proven a great program to transfer files to S3. In addition to working ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/06/29/amazon-s3-jungledisk-and-me/ I have been researching different unit testing tools for .NET lately. Obviously, NUnit was the first I came across, but MbUnit had the RowTest attribute, which allows parameters to be added to tests. This saves a lot of code and is really a must have feature. Luckily, ... http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2008/06/19/nunit-and-rowtest/