Programming Articles

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SEP Selected as a Nominee for TechPoint’s Innovation Mira Award

TechPoint has announced the nominees for its 25th annual Mira Awards, highlighting the most innovative companies, universities, and organizations in Indiana’s tech sector. The awards celebrate achievements across various categories, including the Innovation Partner of the Year. Nominees in this…
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Installing Open Source Android Libraries with Gradle and Android Studio

Android recently started advising developers to use Gradle as their build system for new projects. I don’t really keep up-to-date on the Java ecosystem – and I prefer working in dynamic languages – so I didn’t even really know what a “build system” constituted. All I could think about was nightmares from writing Makefiles in […]
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Beware of Metaprogramming…

A few Google searches will turn up many different conversations about Metaprogramming…covering the good, the bad, and the beautifully elegant implementations. (I recommend using “-ruby” to filter out all of the tutorials and books about Ruby’s implementation of Metaprogramming. For the record, this post is not about Ruby, at all.) Metaprogramming, as I’m using the […]
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Beware of Improper Property Usage

Property abuse in C# is a pet peeve of mine. Properties are meant to represent data, and methods are meant to represent actions. When properties are used improperly, you create a breeding ground for misunderstandings and bugs. Take a look at MSDN’s guidelines on when to use a method instead of a property. See any […]
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Changing Plans – Blog Jam

There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]
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My Favorite Line(s) of Code

Onwards to Round 2 in our current blog battle here at SEP. This time I’ve been asked to write about my favorite line(s) of code. Unfortunately, I don’t have some fancy Ruby, Haskell, or Clojure to dazzle you with. My recent tenure spent managing projects leaves me with little time to focus on the latest […]
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Never implement INotifyPropertyChanged again

I hate every time I am working on something and I have to implement INotifyPropertyChanged.  My DRY-dey sense tingles*.*  Not only am I forced to not use auto-properties (1st DRY violation), I’m forced to fire the event in each setter (2nd DRY violation), and specify the name of the property that is getting set, inside […]
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Syntax Highlighting for Technical Presentations

Ever wanted a quick/easy/automated way to get syntax highlighted code from your editor of choice into PowerPoint? EVERY time I do a technical presentation I need this.  Usually I resort to taking a screenshot, or finding an “export to html” type plugin for the editor I’m using at the time (Visual Studio, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, […]
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Teaching StructureMap About C# 4.0 Optional Parameters and Default Values

This week I ran into wanting to use C# 4.0 optional parameters, but wanted StructureMap (my IoC tool of choice) to respect the default value specified for those optional parameters. The Problem In this example, we’ll be pulling a command out of the container.  The important part is the optional constructor parameter (level), and it’s […]
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Default Value

In .NET we’ve got this cool little language construct called default, that’ll give you the default value for any given type.  That is, null, for any reference type, or zero/false/DateTime.Min/etc. for value types. Here it is in action (nothing amazing going on here): var x =default(DateTime); So what if you don’t know the type you […]
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