Dev Diaries
News and stories from a dev's life
Mark your calendars
Just so you all know, Your Humble Correspondent (that's me!) will be presenting on SpecFlow at the June 13th meeting of the Chicago Visual Studio ALM User Group.
Meeting details:
- Date: June 13th, evening (exact times TBA)
- Location: Chicago Microsoft office, Aon center
- RSVP for the event here
Special thanks goes out to the group's organizer, Angela Dugan, for allowing me to convince her into letting me give the talk. Angela, I can't guarantee that you won't regret this, but I will guarantee that it'll be memorable! :-) Below is the published description of the talk:... more
What I've been up to lately
I've been very preoccupied the last few weeks working on a few things these past few weeks. There's been so many different disparate things going on it's sometimes hard to keep track of everything! Here's a list of what I've been working on:
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There's an interesting story that has come out of the CQRS journey project around discovery, comprehension, and visualization of messaging flows. Stemming from some pains encountered while working on the code, the MIL project and tools aim to help developers focus on relevant code interactions while shielding devs from information overload. You can find the site here. More will be posted on this subject shortly, so stay tuned!... more
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To the drawing board!
This is part 2 of ?? in a series that goes behind the scenes of the PostcardApp.
In Part 1, I gave an overview of how the PostcardApp came into being, and discussed the goals and underpinnings for the project.
In this entry, I’ll discuss the site’s layout and design process from a design perspective. Along the way, you’ll gain understanding into the questions that I asked myself as I worked on the design. Let’s adjourn to the sketch board, shall we?... more
PostcardApp 1.0 nearing release!
Anyone keeping score at home (and I know there’s just scads of you out there!) may have noticed the build numbers busily revving on the PostcardApp’s implementation site in the last day or so and wondered just what was happening. ... more
Gotcha again! Workarounds for ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta issues
The postcardsfromskyrim.net implementation of the postcardApp has been invaluable in getting down to the nuts and bolts of the new ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and WebAPI. While in the midst of adding authentication and authorization to the app, I had an interesting discovery regarding Attribute Filters and how the WebAPI fits into MVC 4. I’ll go over the basic issue and provide a link to a gist example of how to create a custom authorization attribute to transparently authenticate users in both scenarios presented.... more
Curious to learn more about postcardsfromskyrim?
I've just put up a page with a technical listing and overview of the PostcardApp running at postcardsfromskyrim.net. I'll try to keep that page updated as I get more content up and running, so keep an eye on that page to see all the components at play in the system.
UPDATE: A basic help page is available here
Sometimes a pretty picture is all the excuse you need to start coding
I’m pleased to announce the release yesterday of my latest project – Postcardsfromskyrim.net! This website is a project that I gave myself to both to sharpen my skills through practice, learn new techniques and technologies, and to serve as a guide to some new and exciting technologies and the possibilities they open up. I plan on doing in-depth dives on the various aspects of the application in subsequent posts, so stay tuned....
moreThe PostcardApp origin story
When I go on vacation to different places, I snap a lot of photos of scenery – mountains, rock formations, etc. When I got into playing Skyrim, I so enjoyed the landscape that the first few hours of the game saw more screenshots captured than monsters defeated!...
moreSolving problems with Compiler-as-a-Service
Picture the Problem
Ever been in one of those situations when a solution almost seems *too* easy? That’s how I felt recently when I integrated Roslyn’s scripting engine into at an existing codebase with a speed that very nearly made my eyeballs bleed.
I was stumped. As I'd mentioned previously, I'd been experimenting with creating marble diagrams to help me define the different events and state transformations in a simple proof of concept game.
My understanding and knowledge of many of the concepts and patterns involved with using the Reactive Extensions is unfortunately sparse, so I couldn’t make much progress without feedback so I could work through different ways of composing the logic.... more
Modeling game state using a Marble Diagram
There’s a little concept I’m playing around with, and I’m not sure if it’s going to work. The story behind it will take up a post of its own, but suffice it to say that it all started when I read Daniel Cazzulino’s recent blog post on finding key business value by leveraging domain events and reactive extensions, and I immediately thought to myself “this is crazy sweet” and immediately started wondering how well it would work if you could apply the concepts of using Reactive Extensions with XNA. The possibilities seemed compelling. A rough week later (the grisly details of which will also be covered shortly), I took a step back to do some more research and get the figurative ink off my nose and integrate my new findings into the concept’s architecture. One thing I’d found out is that it can be incredibly useful to create a Marble Diagram to represent and model different sequences of events, and their interactions and effects on one another. The material(PDF) I came across discussed the diagrams only in context of the Rx, but I thought it would be useful in modeling gameplay too: a game is a giant state machine (technically it would be a simulation of a state machine. I think.), and a hallmark of a state machine is that subjects raise events and observers listen for events, so there’s my connection!... more
