Recently I bought a new computer with a Samsung Spinpoint F1 as primary hard drive. Every time when I boot up the computer or the system is heavily loading data the hard drive brings the whole computer case into vibrations which is making quite annoying sounds. So I decided to buy a HDD silencer to decouple the hard drive from the computer’s case. At the time of my research several HDD silencer systems where available. The main difference between the various products although was the fact that there are complete decoupling mechanisms and partially decoupling mechanisms for your hard drive.

Hardware hdd vibe fixer, sharkoon, silencer

Sometimes I stumble over some new technologies on the internet and I say to myself “this is just too good to be true”. Recently I came across some nice tutorials and videos about the concurrency and coordination runtime of Microsoft. My first thought was that this is one of that “too good to be true” technologies. But then I did a closer look and decided that this technology is worth mentioning on planetgeek.

The Microsoft Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (short CCR) is part of the Microsoft CCR and Decentralized Software Services (DSS) toolkit which is available both for .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 3.5 Compact Framework. The mind blowing core of the toolkit is the CCR which has originally evolved from the Microsoft Robotics Platform and Research. Due increase demands of customers Microsoft decided to put the core technology into the toolkit and provide it for the software community.

.NET Arbiter, CCR, Concurrency, Coordination, Dispatcher, Port, Runtime, Toolkit

Remote software for free

Normally I’m not a big promoter of software. But this tool is amazing. Every, and I mean every IT Professional is having the same problem. Everybody in the world looks at you and sees the free helpdesk. Ok I must admit most of the time this is not a problem because helping is caring friendship. Helping over the phone is good because you don’t have to travel. But this is not easy for each occasion. There are a lot of good remote software programs for companies. But the use in private environments is not as easy as it should be because you need port forwarding, special firewall rules etc. Looking around in the Internet I found a very exciting tool for remote support. It’s called TeamViewer.

Administration, Software Remote, Support, teamviewer, VNC

I found the blog Agile: In A Flash some time ago and I really like it.

The blog discusses agile software development based on flash cards. The authors put together cards that each express a single idea, practice or methodology in agile software development.

Go and have a look!

Methodology Agile, cards

When I’m coaching teams in Test Driven Development (TDD), I’m often asked how to deal with the User Interface (UI). The problem is that the unit test frameworks are weak in testing Forms, Controls, Buttons, Grids, and so on. Weak because they do not support it at all or the tests become very fragile (e.g. renaming a Label causes the test to fail).

We address this problem with the Passive View Command pattern, PVC for short.

.NET, Architecture, Testing Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter, Passive View, Passive View Command, Patterns, PVC, Test Driven Development, Testability, Unit Test

I’m currently working with Windows 7 Public Beta (Build 7000) and I’m very satisfied with it. I only had two blue screens since I have installed it 3 months ago. I would like to share some really cool features in W7 in an upcoming post and look at this video on Channel 9.

But the interesting thing from a .NET Developers perspective is the 64 Bit part of Windows 7 (that should be the same as in Windows XP 64 Bit or Windows Vista 64 Bit) which I will cover in this post.

First of all: Most of the things developing .NET are running very well. The drawbacks will be shown later…

.NET, Software, Windows 7 .NET, 64 Bit, Memory, Windows 7

I proudly announce the new features of SyntaxHighlighter2 even before the new release is available on the internet! Today I had a lovely chat via Skype with S H Mohanjith from Sri Lanka. We were discussing some feature improvements on SyntaxHighlighter2 wordpress plug-in.

Software Mohanjith, SyntaxHighlighter2, Wordpress

A few weeks ago, I started using Mockito. Mockito is a mocking framework for Java.

What mockito is able to do:
- mocking interfaces and abstract classes
- mocking concrete classes
- spy real objects

(http://code.google.com/p/mockito)

I liked mockito so much that I decided to present it to you…

Java, Testing Java, mocking framework, Mockito, Testing

We can happily announce that our team is growing. A new team member recently joined the planetgeek team. His name is Thomas Weingartner. He will be publishing his curriculum vitea on the about page as soon as possible. We are happy to have you in our team Thomas! A warm welcome to you!

Announcement Author, Member