Monday 29 December 2008

CodeFest 2008

The inaugural CodeFest 2008 is over. Attendees Clarence Bakirtzidis and myself made our first 3 silverlight apps. Though I have made a small one before for work.

Hello World
Showing some images
Showing a video

We spent a day from 10 am and it was a lot of fun.
We used Microsoft live to host the silverlight apps as its free, the only hitch is it has no database. The video was encoded using Expression Encoder and the code was Developed using Expression Blend2 sp1 and Visual Studio 2008.

Our next attempt will have to be a game, or so we said as clarence left.

Friday 26 December 2008

Speed up Firefox startup

I found this great post to speedup the firefox startup.

It amounts to settings 4 settings in the about:config
network.http.pipelining=true
network.http.proxy.pipelining=true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=30
and add integer
nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0.

"Normally Firefox will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading."

And the initial paint delay of 0 makes firefox render immediately.

Be warned this may break some of your page views. But for me if it gets rid of the annoyingly slow startup while sacrificing a few pages, I can live with it.

If I find any others Ill add them.

Saturday 20 December 2008

I found this reason to use a DSL today, and it is the best reason to use a DSL I have heard of so far.

"DSL allows business people to read through code and understand what is going on, so they can spot misinterpreted requirements."

I wonder if it is true in practice?

Saturday 6 December 2008

StyleCop for ReSharper

I ran into this little plug in on CodePlex StyleCop For Resharper the other day. It's still in development but it seems a great idea.

To all the people working on it, keep it up, it looks really good so far.