http://blog.realcoderscoding.com Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:05:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've often found myself working on a class in some legacy application using objects hidden away in third-party libraries and thinking, "Wow... it would be really great if I could call this current existing method but have it process asynchronously (without blocking) and then notify me when it is complete." The ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2009/09/lambdas-extension-methods-async/ We've all been there before--trying to track down some insipid bug which is impossible to reproduce on a developer's machine. What is the response? To add more logging of course! That's all well and good, but eventually your log files are going to start getting huge. Don't get me wrong, I ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2009/05/filter-logs-by-changing-log4net-configuration/ One of my clients asked me to write a very simple RESTful web service to retrieve user data (name, email, address, etc.) based on login credentials.  Having recently finished working on a PHP-driven RESTful interface for another client (based on the Zend Framework), I thought this would be a simple ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2009/05/not-so-restful-days/ The main purpose of RealCodersCoding is to post about problems we, the authors, have overcome in our daily coding adventures.  Sometimes, the problems we are faced with are complex and require some interesting coding yoga to to work out.  Other times the solutions are drop-dead simple, but we refuse to ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2009/01/reinstalling-sql-server-2005-or-8-hours-of-my-life-wasted/ One of the great things about .NET 3.5 is that it is fully inter-operable with .NET 2.0. You just have to reference the right assemblies and you can use WPF and Windows Forms from the same application! This is great for slowly migrating a .NET 2.0 application over to .NET ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/12/how-to-avoid-a-systemexecutionengineexception-when-opening-a-wpf-window-from-windows-form/ I recently ran into an issue with an application that was not detecting a physical network problem and was consequently losing data while attempting to write it to the socket. I know what you are thinking. Sounds like poor programming; surely the .NET Socket class has a clean and Object Oriented ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/10/detecting-a-physical-network-disconnection-with-net-sockets/ I've been doing a lot of work with .NET Sockets lately, and I will be posting more articles discussing what I've been working on in greater detail. In this article, I want to talk about the concept of reading a Socket asynchronously, raising events to notify your application when bytes ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/10/minimize-asynchronous-socket-callbacks-with-dynamic-buffer-sizes/ One of my current clients has an old FoxPro (old as in created in '97 and upgraded in '99) database application that the users can't stand.  It frequently crashes and it's all too easy to lose valuable data after a lengthy data entry session (just by clicking the sadly misnamed ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/10/tips-on-creating-excel-spreadsheets-via-php/ Do you have an application that starts misbehaving randomly? You aren't quite sure what is going on, but it seems like for some reason your Timer just stops firing it's event handler--and once it stops it never starts back up. This drove me nuts! But, it is definitely a problem in ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/09/systemthreadingtimer-stops-firing-in-windows-server-2003-sp1/ I was introduced to the world of agile software methodologies and, in particular, Scrum at my last company.  In fact, on my first day new whiteboards were delivered to almost every office and a book called Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman was handed out to at ... http://blog.realcoderscoding.com/index.php/2008/09/spreading-the-word-w-information-radiators/