Blogs

OK, this is why my blogging activity has slowed to a crawl, or downright stopped lately. I've been working quite a bit on my next book: More Effective C#. It's getting closer, and it's now available on Rough Cuts. Rough Cuts is a Safari Books...

I stopped down in Toledo on Tuesday to talk to the Northwest Ohio .NET Usergroup about IronPython. The talk went well, though the demo gods frowned upon me during my presentation. It all boiled down to adding my Python installtion to my IronPython path...

Next week, our local user group ( GANG ) is having Jason Beres -- INETA Speaker and Director of Product Management for Infragistics -- come and talk about building applications with Silverlight 2.0. I'm really looking forward to this one since I haven't...

What is the first triangle number to have more than 500 divisors? Ok, this one kicked me in the pants, and it kicked my little Mac in the pants as well. I had to relearn how to get divisors quickly and efficiently, which meant seeking the wisdom of others...

For those of you out there doing e-commerce, check out 7 Billion People . They specialize in a more personalized e-commerce experience, and they have a hard-working, experienced team behind them. Take a look at their marketing videos: http://www.youtube...

Keith Elder will be back in Michigan next month for the Lansing Day of .NET ! This is great news. Keith is a great presenter and is always entertaining and informative. I've submitted a couple of abstracts myself. Even if I don't present, I'll...

Next week, on Tuesday, May 20, we're holding a 1-day open spaces event at SRT Solutions. The theme is Software Engineering Tools. The participants will define the topics for discussion, but we think that people might want to talk about version control...

A customer asked me to write a very small application that performs some operations on 2D parametric curves. While their code base for their primary software is C++ Win32, I thought this would be a great opportunity to show off C#.Net to them, but that...

In this problem we are searching for the largest product of four consecutive numbers in any row, column, or diagonal of a given 20 by 20 matrix. This is a nice sort of problem to do in Matlab because it is so well-suited for working with matrices. I wrote...

The NHibernate FAQ has a new post about complex object graphs and lazy loading. If you use NHibernate (or, ActiveRecord -- which makes NHibernate a whole lot easier), it's worth a look. The technique described can greatly improve the way your app...

Last week, Bill Wagner and I were providing some C# training for one of our clients. Bill showed the class how to use F12 to jump to the definition of a method. One of the students asked how to go back to your previous position and Bill didn't know...

Project Euler problem 3 reads as follows: The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29. What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143 ? There are no special Python features here that really require explaining. The logic is also straightforward...

What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20? ---- To solve this problem easily, we need to remember that the smallest number that is evenly divisible by two numbers is their least common multiple. Armed with...

At home, I run Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS since I'm a sucker for eye candy ( Compiz FTW) and I'm a nerd.  At work, most of my development needs to be done in Windows, and until recently, I found myself missing some of the features that...

James Iry pointed out that I could have used a fold left in my solution to the first ProjectEuler problem. Ah, now I remember reading about folds! So, I went back and looked at it. Right he is, of course. Here's his solution: val nums = 3 until 1000...