A project I’m currently on makes heavy use of MSMQ and private queues. Every so often, it’s necessary to purge messages from the queue during development. I got tired of always using the MMC snap-in to perform this task, so I whipped up this quick PowerShell script to handle the dirty work for me. Granted, it’s pretty crude, but it gets the job done. Any suggestions or improvements, feel free to let me know.
Just recently I switch my mobile carrier from Rogers to WIND Mobile. Their Holiday Miracle plan was just to good to pass up - even paying the penalty to break my Rogers contract I will still save money in the long run. Anyway, once the number got transferred over, I didn’t have a 3G connection, even after selecting the WIND Home APN. After a bit of google, it seems that what I had to do is to setup an APN. In case I can’t find it later, here are the APN settings:
I’ve spent a bit of my spare time in the past week looking at Windows Phone 7 from a developer’s point of view. I’d have started sooner, but honestly, I didn’t see the point until there were actually devices that I could hold and use. I know that in the U.S., some guys got developer phones from Microsoft, but I don’t think that anybody up here in Canada was that lucky. So, over the past year or so I’ve been dabbling with Android and I actually like programming for Android.
Life has been a bit busy as of late. On Sept 4, 2010 a little monster invaded my house. A savage beast, suitably evolved for our Canadian winters and a fearless hunter of snow-snakes. Oh, that, and it turns out that she is a distant cousin to my last dog Bailey. This is my new puppy Casey, who is just shy of 9 weeks old.
A while ago, I posted a blog article about using IntelliJ for Android development. Given that was a year ago, and one version of IntelliJ later, I thought I would do a follow up post. Long story short (and to sound like a TV commercial): I liked IntelliJ IDEA 9 so much, I bought a license.
Since I blogged last year, the Android plug-in for IntelliJ has really matured. I guess the only draw back to it is that you only get the Android plug-in when you buy the Unlimited Edition of IntelliJ – it’s not in the Community Edition. Here are some general comments/thoughts/observations of mine:
Lately I’ve found myself doing a lot more web application development in JavaScript. Typically, I always seem to fall back on plain old Notepad++ or Visual Studio. As a developer, the user experience in either is, IMHO, somewhat lacking.
However, for the past week, I’ve been using RubyMine. RubyMine is a Ruby on Rails IDE from Jetbrains, but it seems to work rather well for editing JavaScript and HTML files. Plus, as an added bonus, it automatically comes with built in support for jQuery.
I guess I forgot to mention this: On April 1, 2010, I received an e-mail from Microsoft that my MVP in C# was renewed for the third year. This makes me a happy, because with Resharper 5 (and therefore Visual Studio 2010) and Windows Mobile 7, I’m hoping that this will be an exciting year for the .NET crowd.
Well, okay, perhaps I didn’t forget. Given that it was April 1st when I got the e-mail, I like to give things a few days to settle down. I am acquainted with some mischievous pranksters who would think it was a funny April Fools joke.
Well, today was a rather sad around the household. This morning I had to take Bailey, my dog, to the vet to be put down. She had just turned 14 years old in September of this year, and age had finally caught up with her. Her hips were going and we were getting concerned that one day she would be stuck on the floor and wouldn’t be able to walk anymore.
At the end of my talk on Git at the Edmonton Code Camp, somebody asked if I would put the links to the various git resources up on my website. Here they are:
There you go, enjoy, and be distributed.
One question that has been bouncing around in my mind is what, exactly, does one have to do to be considered Agile? Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
