Winterdom

There's a lot of talk about Domain Specific Languages lately. The exact definition of what a DSL is, however, might change depending on who you ask. Microsoft itself tends to favor significantly Visual DSLs, that is, domain specific languages that are made of visual components (as opposed to Text-based DSLs...

Lately, I've been having quite a bit of problems at home with DNS and my Internet connection. The problem started manifesting by pages simply refusing to open in Firefox, constantly getting the "this page cannot be displayed" dialog as soon as I tried to open the page. Hitting F5 to...

I've been trying to learn more about functional programming in general lately, and there's a lot of good stuff around to read on it. Unfortunately for me, a lot of the content on the web on the topic uses Haskell to explain the concepts, and I find the Haskell syntax...

Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) handles some of the Font and Colors settings differently from VS2005. While Orcas can import .vssettings files generated its predecessor, there are a couple of problems: Custom colors for User Types and C# @"" strings don't get imported. This is because the name of the settings...

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has been released and I've installed RTM, I spend a little bit of time porting all my different Visual Studio 2005 Color Schemes so that they work correctly with 2008 (importing the original VS2005 .vssettings files worked, but didn't quite import schemes completely). I've now...

Ending last week, my friend John Lam pushed a big set of IronRuby and DLR changes into the public IronRuby SVN repository (announcement). These include some of the initial changes in the Dynamic Language Runtime Infrastructure. I'm still going through the new bits, but from what I can see so...

The ArraySegment</a> struct in .NET 2.0 was a very smart idea. But has anyone else wondered just why the heck it doesn't implement a zero-based indexer itself and an enumerator that returns just the elements in the array segment?</p> I mean, honestly, without those, all ArraySegment does is saving you...

Does anyone know why the heck dasBlog insists on screwing up whitespace in a post when generating the RSS Feed? It preserves it correctly when it writes out the feed's HTML, but generates RSS that simply removes it at random places, and it's usually the reason why code samples get...

Last night someone brought to my attention that the current versions of PipelineTesting always return null from the IPipelineContext.GetEventStream() method. This is expected to return an EventStream object so that pipeline components can write to BAM, but I never had bothered looking it up before. I've now fixed this so...

This is just something to remind myself next time I need to implement a WCF service using the BasicHttpBinding with transport-only security (SSL + client certificates)': WCF expects that the "Require SSL" option in IIS is enabled. If Metadata Exchange is needed, configure the MEX endpoint with a custom binding...