Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

Its finally here!    Follow the announcement of  Lightswitch . The public beta is going to be available on late August,   I suggest you try it out. LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the cloud and the desktop.

  I am working on a Windows Phone 7 application, so that I can learn about development on the Windows Phone 7, so far it is a really great experience. I love using Linq, Xml serialization, extension methods, Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight, XAML, and all the technologies I am so familiar with. I wrote a paper about the phone application which is called "Which Way Is Faster": A Mobile Phone Application Leveraging Location Tracking to Determine Which Commonly Traveled Routes are Faster. The presentation and paper can be viewed here: presentation paper

  Here is my SharePoint tip of the day. This is a helpful technique for debugging/testing SharePoint methods without having to fire up IIS. In my SharePoint code, I write my methods as public static methods that take an SPList or SPWeb object as a parameter. This may seem weird since you could just get these from SPContext.Current.Web. The reason for this is that this is a functional style programming technique where we don’t have class level variables. Instead the method takes in everything they need via parameters. The advantage of this is that I can write a console application and reference my SharePoint project and test my EventReceiver method (or Feature Receiver or WebPart or whatever) without having to deploy my SharePoint solutions, fire up IIS, etc. etc. It makes debugging and setting through code much quicker.  Of course once I have tested it in my console app, then I need to test it in the browser. Sample Console Application. Note that I create my SPWeb object a...

OneNote 2010 is a great product. I have been using OneNote daily for a couple years now. It has become my default repository for important information. - Tasks lists - Design before I build software solutions for work - Meeting notes - Class notes The great thing about OneNote is that it is a three dimensional space (notebooks, sections, pages) instead of a one dimensional space in a product like MS Word. Also, you spend much less time worry about formatting details, and more time getting your ideas and thoughts recorded. OneNote is almost an extension of my brain.  Now with OneNote online, I use one note to plan with friends and family. I like the rich client with offline synchronization which makes OneNote a more productive experience than Google Docs.  I am on the road and often have a slow internet connection, so with offline sync, a slow connection doesn’t slow me down.

I forget at times that Software Engineering is a young discipline. At times I am frustrated that it is not easier to measure good software and good software developers. The following gives some insightful perspective: -------------------- Measurement can progress from lower to higher scales as societies, organizations, and practices mature. An illuminating example: We can imagine, for example, that certain Eskimos might speak of temperature only as freezing or not freezing and, thereby, place it on a nominal scale. Others might try to express degrees of warmer and colder, perhaps in terms of some series of natural events, and thereby achieve an ordinal scale. As we all know, temperature became an interval scale with the development of thermometry, and, after thermodynamics had used the expansion ratio of gases to extrapolate to zero, it became a ratio scale." — S. Stevens, 1956 There is an important lesson here for software ...

  It was cool to discover that Channel 9 linked to my blog post on how RAM disks do not speed up Visual Studio :   Joe Nalewabau and Dan Fernandez talk about my blog. Starting at minute 19:50, Dan says: Dan: "Joseph Fluckiger", I hope I am pronouncing that right.  Joe: "I'll let you handle that one". Dan: "Probabaly for the better."  :) Dan: “We talked about this at our 1 year anniversary with Scott Hansleman using RAM disks to speed up Visual Studio. Joseph actually went through and did a test of RAM disk vs. no RAM disk. And he actually shows that RAM disks aren’t worth it. They are only a few milliseconds faster and you have to copy files into the RAM disk which is a pain.” Dan: "Thank you Joseph for actually doing the work and verifying that it is a vicious rumor."   I found the Channel 9 reference because I was looking through my blog stats and saw that the RAM disk post is the most...

I discovered a great little .NET developer tool yesterday: LINQPad . I needed to write a LINQ statement with a Group By and was having trouble figuring it out. While poking around on stack overflow , someone suggested this tool. But even better, the most useful application of this little application is the ability to quickly write pieces of code. It has a nice little interface which applies indentation and colors to your code, but is also very light weight and fast. It even allows you to quickly execute your code and display the results with a nice little .Dump() utility. My Visual Studio has been quite slow lately since my project has hundreds of thousands of lines and I am also running Resharper. Write snippets of Code quickly with LINQPad:   Learning LINQ:

I recently decided to go back to school to get a degree in software engineering from the University Of Texas at Austin attending the executive format offered by the engineering department. Is it worth it? What is it like? You can read more on the UT website, but below I will give you my personal perspective, the answers to the questions I had when deciding whether to pursue the degree. First question: Are the topics covered relevant?   I am a consultant software developer working for Catapult Systems working on enterprise software development. Am I going to learn things which I can apply? I don’t want academic fluff. I am a working professional and need real application. I am currently in my first semester and so far the material has been very interesting and I have been able to apply much of the material learned to my current projects at work. I’ve even integrated some of the code written for projects into projects at work. Below is a list of the courses offered. Here is a cour...

I’ve been running an SSD as my primary drive for a few weeks now and it performs quite well. Outlook doesn’t hang, and Visual Studio build times are cut way down. Boot up and shut down are much better. Total cost: $260 + $50 = 310. Using winsat tool: Patriot Torqx SSD 64 GB, as primary drive in laptop Sequential read: 116 MB/s (3 x faster) Random read: 39 MB/s (35 x faster) Sequential write: 90 MB/s (2.5 x faster) 7200 RPM 100 GB in expansion slot : Sequential read: 40 MB/s Random read: 1.11 MB/s Sequential write: 34.7 MB/s

Stackoverflow.com is a fantastic online resource for answers to technical questions. There are several reasons that Stackoverflow.com is better than other sites. Jeff Atwood, who is the founder of stack overflow described the site succinctly as "expertsexchange.com without the evil. :)" The Webster's type definition would be: Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. It is unique in that it uses aspects of wikis, blogs, digg, and forums to allow the best answers float to the top rather than stay buried somewhere among other less useful answers. I loved experts exchange . It was the site that helped me get started in programming back when I was learning Perl. I was amazed at how quickly people would give of their time to answer my questions. Now I am glad to see an even better resource called stack overflow. Give it a try. You'll find higher quality answers than any other online Q&A site...