- TransactionInDoubtException – posted Apr 2, 2015
One of the most interesting things you can get to experience when you're working with development is bug reports from a customer that impacts their business, but no one is really sure what is the underlying cause. Another thing that we developers love is war stories from the trenches, and this is one of those war stories. We got a report stating that operations people were starting to see the following TransactionInDoubtException exception.
- Mercurial 2.3 sprint – posted May 13, 2012
Just finished the Mercurial 2.3 developer sprint on behalf of the company I work for, Edlund A/S. It was really nice to meet a lot of the familiar faces and the new ones from Facebook and Wolfram Research. It is especially in meetups like these that you truly get to experience the friendliness that's part of the people around the Mercurial project. Some of my more noteworthy contributions around the Mercurial eco-system during the sprint were: Release RepoMan, the repository forest manager that we have developed at Edlund A/S for managing a complex multi-repository setup where some modules are individually co-dependent but we want to be able to modify all of them coherently at the same time.
- X.509 certificates and Mercurial – posted Apr 9, 2010
As one of the primary developers touching certificates in the Mercurial world, I am often asked how they work, what people need to do to use them and how they can work well with Mercurial. A principal thing to remember here is that Mercurial will not work as a complete server out of the box, requesting authentication information, in the form of basic, digest, or certificates, at all. This means that in order to use X.509 certificates with Mercurial, one needs to place a web server that knows of these authentication mechanisms in front of it.
- Covariance and design principles – posted Oct 18, 2007
As promised in the last blog post, it is time to get down and dirty with technical facts. Or said in another way, it is time to look at: ‘Why C# let me down’ (you may imagine the blood dripping from the italicised letters). As the title may lead you to believe, the let-down has a lot to do with covariant types, but what are covariant types anyway? Why do they matter?
- Extensible languages – posted Mar 28, 2006
Yesterday I attended a colloquium where Erik van Wyk from University of Minnesota spoke on techniques and tools for making extensible languages. Now extensible language may sound like a strange concept, but it is a fairly simple idea that lies at heart of this: I want to add this new construct to my language because it may simplify my work. Now that's a pretty basic motivation for us to do some work, so we don't have to do so much work.
- WSE, DIME, certificates and large attachments – posted Oct 16, 2005
Sometimes technology isn't really transparent enough, even for us developers. When you do web development with IIS, WSE and ASP.NET you might consider it fairly straightforward to create a webservice that accepts file uploads. I thought so, so off I went coding. Everything went well, the files were being uploaded. Time to test this on production data: 400 Bad Request. Hmm. Of course, prior to this I have already modified web.config to up the max request length like this: So why is it refusing files with an error 400 as soon as they go beyond about 4096KB?
- C#, VB and LINQ – posted Sep 30, 2005
I went to a colloquium on LINQ (I guess this link might die in the future when the future is no longer the future, so to speak) presented by Erik Meijer who is a technical lead in the WebData group (whatever they do). Meijer is a very charismatic speaker and it was a very good presentation he did (although Virtual PC on his laptop couldn't entirely keep up). For the uninitiated LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and it brings set relational functionality to .NET.
- Atomic Cellular Dysfunction – posted Feb 17, 2005
It isn't that my organism is self-destructing (much) that I've picked this rather funky topic for today's post, nay, it is far more sinister and dark - it is the topic of a contest that I participated in, together with Noah Adler last month, a contest that was about creating a game in 48 hours to the theme: Atomic Cellular Dysfunction. We managed to create, within the 48 hours, a lovely game in style with the games of the 80s that we have both grown up on and loved, so without further ado, we bring Atomic Cellular Dysfunction to the world.
- A DIME for your Country - the continued story – posted Jun 11, 2004
I have previously discussed Microsoft's DIME implementation in their Web Service Enhancements 1.0 library for .NET. Namely the part where they manage to break any and all support for non-ASCII SOAP transfers. It seems as if they've rectified this grivious mistake in version 2.0 of WSE, so now we can have international messages, yay! Of course we have to rebind our solutions, re-test and all, but hey, what don't we do to get them internation characters delivered to our doorstep?
- A DIME for your Country – posted Apr 5, 2004
Lately at work I have been on a project where we needed to implement a web service client. A part of this client is accepting a series of files passed as DIME attachments. Since .NET doesn't implement this on its own we had to dig forth the Microsoft WSE 1.0 library, which features a series of extensions to the normal web service programming support. To understand the full conundrum let us back up a bit.