Archive for December, 2007

Turbocharging .Net Webservice Clients

Since the first version of .Net and its associated toolset, Microsoft have sought to make it easy to write SOAP services and SOAP clients. And, generally, they have succeeded quite well. Whilst the open-source world has tended to prefer the simpler REST approach, MS (and Sun, and Apache) have done an admirable job of taking [ READ MORE ]

Legacy Code, Refactoring, and Ownership

Refactoring is good. Everyone knows that. Since Fowler popularised the concept with the seminal Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code it’s become a staple of the industry, and has pride of place on many a bookshelf. In the many, many articles and discussions of the subject, the key goals and benefits of refactoring are [ READ MORE ]

Coding by Convention

I’ve been meaning for a while to have a play around with Ruby on Rails, on the basis that anything generating so much hype over the last year or two deserves some level of investigation, if only to see whether the hype is justified. So, I spent a couple of days working through Agile [ READ MORE ]

Reindenting a File in Vim

I’m going to post a series of helpful Vim snippets here, particularly for features that I don’t necessarily use every day and hence forget about after a while. By posting them here, I’ve got a nice easy one-stop-shop for finding them. The first tip is reindenting source code. Hitting ‘=‘ will reindent visually-selected code , or [ READ MORE ]

Renault Save the Queen

I don’t tend to go in for flag-waving patriotism a great deal. Whilst I think the armed forces deserve our respect and our thanks, I tend to find The Sun’s “Our Boys” rhetoric twee and jingoistic. Whilst I enjoy watching England play football (and anyone who’s watched them recently will know that’s not a statement [ READ MORE ]