Winterdom

I've struggled quite a bit over the past few months trying to come up with a good way of including code snippets in my blog posts. The problem, of course, is making the code look good both when browsing the website as well as in the RSS feed. It's not...

Last time I talked a bit about Call Actions; now let's talk a bit about another kind of action: InvokeMember actions. As their name implies, these are useful for calling instance methods on .NET objects. I struggled a bit with InvokeMember actions because they are act a little differently than...

There's a thread going on at reddit regarding an old FYI RFC about computer naming conventions. This made me think a bit about how I name my machines, and realize I don't really have a convention at all. Or, rather, I've had several over the years ranging from places/characters from...

A few days ago, I mentioned I did simple backups using the SyncToy powertool, and mentioned I might try replacing it with Robocopy. The end result is a simple PowerShell script that drives Robocopy. It simply backs up a specific set of directories and my VPC data virtual hard drive...

This time I'm going to talk a bit as to how to implement function calls in the Dynamic Language Runtime. Last time, I mentioned that I had initially had implemented function definitions as simply returning a raw CodeBlockExpression. This works, but it doesn't give you many options to add custom...

One of the first things I tried to get working on my simple programming language was being able to define functions. Initially I started just with global functions, and then with local (i.e. nested) functions. For the most part, this is easy in the DLR. You create a new function...

I've been playing for some time now with the Dynamic Language Runtime. At first I started simply playing around with its hosting interfaces, but later I realized I really wanted to check more closely how it worked, so I started building a very simple language on top of it. My...

Jeff Atwood's post on backup strategies made me reflect on what I was doing myself to keep my data safe. I don't really have a "backup strategy", though I do try to keep a good backup around (and I'm always careful to, for example, backup my laptop when I'm traveling...

One of the commands I've found more useful in PowerShell is the resolve-path command, which "interprets the wildcard characters in a path and displays the items and containers at the location specified by the path, such as the files and folders or registry keys and subkeys. The names appear just...

<img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="232" alt="Console" src="/weblog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/Console_C7C1/Console_thumb_1.png" width="300" align="right" border="0" /> I'm a heavy user of the command line on Windows, and for a number of years I've used the open source Console application instead of running plain cmd.exe as my console of choice. I...