This week a nice opportunity knocked on the door. As a windows server administrator in large companies you cannot configure every day switches and routers from the basis. Normally some network guy will do the configuration of the cool Cisco stuff for you. The configuration of Cisco is very easy when you know something about networks. The only problem is to know the commands. This week and in the next post we’ll do an easy basic configuration together. The lab is created in an old version of the boson NetSim. Witch is a Cisco IOS and a Cat OS Simulator. It is not the best tool, but it will do the job.

Administration, Hardware Cisco, ios

March 22nd, 2009 at 22:14 Ryan Rogers

This solution only works for .Net CF prior to 3.5 as the Target and Method properites did not exist before that. Any ideas how to “fake” DynamicInvoke for CF 2.0? I am using extension methods through the ExtensionAttribute trick.
Delegatedynamicinvoke-for-net-compact-framework

Hello Ryan,

The problem is that the .NET compact framework 2.0 is lacking some really important functionality. What we can get by using ugly reflection code is the target object where the delegate points to and the method pointer of the target method.

Ask a geek .NET CF 2.0, Delegate, DynamicInvoke

Recently I was facing a problem regarding delegates. I needed to dynamically create a delegate which “points to” a dynamically reflected method which is not static on a given type. The problem was, that at the time of the “inspection” of the type I had no instance of that type available. Normally delegates “pointing to” instances are said to be closed on a given  instance therefore you need to have a concrete instance of the type available which the delegate can be bound to.

An example of a closed delegate is the following:

public delegate void MyDelegate(string parameter)

But what happens if you don’t have an instance of a given type present at the time of inspection and you want to dynamically create and later assign the delegate to a type?

.NET, Announcement closed type delegates, Delegate, Delegate.CreateDelegate, Dynamically create delegates, open type delegates

Andrew Kazyrevich published a post containing timing comparisons of Moq, Rhino Mocks, Isolator and NMock2.

And NMock2 – although still lacking some features – is very fast compared to the competitors. Woohoo!

I’m curious how the newly introduced features (mock classes, non-strict and recursive mocks) will change in this setup. I’ll check that out as soon as I find some time :-O

If you want to check the new features (alpha!) yourself then here is the svn URL: https://nmock2.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nmock2/branches/nonstrictmocks

Happy mocking!

.NET, Announcement, Software, Testing .NET, Isolator, mocking framework, Moq, NMock2, Rhino Mocks, unit testing

Lately I was refactoring a manager class which used internally a private struct to hold instances belonging together in a dictionary. Some referenced instances hold in this struct were disposable, thus implementing the IDisposable interface. The thought of implementing IDisposable on the internal struct came across my mind but then I quickly asked myself what happens with the struct if you implement IDisposable in .NET. I want to present the result of my research in this article.

.NET boxing, IDisposable, struct, structs, unboxing, using, value types

Lately, I asked myself why I like Scrum most. I’m a big fan of Scrum because of a lot of things. So I asked myself: “What is the root cause of all these”.

I tracked it down to two main things:

1. Focus
2. Feedback

I’ll come back to that later.

I’m also a big fan of Test Driven Development. Guess what,  I performed a root cause analysis on TDD, too. And once again:

1. Focus
2. Feedback

After that, I asked myself: “Are there other things I like with these root causes?”.

Yes there are:

• Playing Volleyball and Gaming in general: focus on playing (one round after another), feedback (you win or lose)
• Playing Saxophone: focus on playing (I forget everything else while playing, believe me), feedback (you hear what you play and you either like it or or you try harder)

So it seems, I’m addicted to the Focus-Feedback drug :-O

Methodology, Test Driven Development Feedback, Focus, scrum, TDD, Test Driven Development

Yesterday, I visited an interesting presentation from Tudor Girba. He showed us several ways for visualize code. One of the most interesting visualization was Code City.

(ArgoUML from http://moose.unibe.ch/tools/codecity)

Java Code City, Java, Software Engineering

Today we take a closer look at the Microsoft Active Directory in the 2008 native mode. One of the problems that windows administrators often face in the daily business is the setting of password policies for the whole company. Under Windows Server 2003 it was not possible to set more than one policy for the accounts. So from the domain administrator to the user every body needed the same complex password. Under active directory in version 2008 there is a new object type in the schema which is called PSO (password settings object). The only way to create the PSO is in ADSI edit. Click on start and enter “adsiedit.msc”.

Administration, Security password, policy, pso

Some people share the opinion that scrum and other agile development methods are easily maintainable with pencil and post-it only. Nonetheless there is a growing list of software solutions which support scrum methodology. Boris Gloger from Scrum 4 You publishes regularly reviews of scrum tools on his blog. I strongly recommend to take a look at his website and the scrum tools list!

http://scrum4you.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/scrum-tools-list/

http://scrum4you.wordpress.com

Methodology, Software Agile, boris gloger, scrum, scrum4you, tools

For those of you interested in TDD:

I’m speaking at the conference SET (Software Engineering Today) in Schlieren (Zurich) on Tuesday May 5th.

I’ll show the basics of the TDD cycle, benefits and pitfalls, and how you get started.

Link to SET 2009: SET 2009

Link to my session (german): TDD

Looking forward to some interesting discussions…

Methodology Conference, SET, TDD, Test Driven Development, unit testing