If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am no fan of the System.Drawing namespace.  It’s a rush job thinly wrapped layer on top of GDI+.  A great deal is only partially implemented and there is quite a lot of undocumented behavior.  Today I hope to help a bit with this problem by running some tests on System.Drawing.dll ...

I recently switched from NewsGator to Google Reader for reading RSS subscriptions, and along with that, I had to switch from a native iPhone app to using the iPhone version of Google Reader’s web application. The full-size Google Reader is one of the best web applications that I use – it’s just as good as GMail or Google Maps in terms of ...

There is a process in hardware and OS management that I like to call Configuration Jeopardy.  It’s when you’re working on a particular task and you spend hours or days trying to solve a problem that you know should be easy to solve but neither Google nor in-built documentation are any help because you simply don’t know the right ...

Sure, every developer uses his/her compiler, editor, debugger, IDE, etc. but does it stop there?  Heck no. Here are the set of tools I use in addition, in no particular order: Visual Studio 2008 with the following additions TestDriven.Net – lets me run my NUnit unit tests in the IDE Home Grown comment macro: Imports ...

This blog post will be about a practical example of using IEnumerable<T> to make solving common problems easier. Here’s a common abstract problem – walk a tree of nodes visiting each node and possibly perform an operation on a node’s contents.  An concrete version of that is finding one or more files within a file system. The typical ...

Last night, Atalasoft and Snowtide Informatics sponsored a meeting of the Western Mass Developers Group, which featured Ben Fry speaking about Computational Information Design and the Processing programming language. O’Reilly also pitched in by giving us a few copies of Ben’s book, Visualizing Data, to give away. The talk was a fascinating ...

At PDC several years ago, I attended the first talk on C# 3.0 by Anders Hejlsberg wherein he demonstrated LINQ and the new lambda syntax for C#.  In the QA, I asked if it there was or could be a syntax for recursive lambda expressions.  The answer was a “hadn’t really considered that". The problem is that lambda expressions in C# ...

In the image processing world, like most computational problems, we often think our work is composed of only two basic ideas: representation and transformation.  Of course, one may have many layers of both representations of transformations and transformations of representations which can make things appear quite complex at times. ...

In no particular order - Common Design Patterns – Design patterns are tools to let us solve common problems.  Knowing your design patterns can make the solution to a problem easy. At Least One Assembly Language – One can program quite well without this, but when it comes time to debug something for which the source isn’t available or ...

While in most cases there is no explicit information in an assembly as to which languages it was compiled from, it is possible to make an educated guess as to which languages were used.  This is due to the fact that each different .NET compiler leaves it’s own unique type of fingerprint.  In this article I discuss both my methodology for ...