Writing, toys, and Hephaestus.
Writing
Repository-managed static copies of the public WordPress posts now live inside the shared timoch.com shell.
Observed posts
August 14, 2013
Have you ever been annoyed with having to implement the cumbersome plumbing required for INotifyPropertyChanged ? Well, I have. So I tried to find a way to make authoring bindable objects better. The typical example:
CategoriesDevelopment
June 21, 2013
In a previous post, I mentioned that model validation should be tested separately from controller logic. I will demonstrate a way of unit testing the validation of models implemented with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. It is actually quire easy to unit test model validation. Models are inherently easy to test separately due to their POD (Plain Old Data) nature.
June 11, 2013
I came across a question on stackoverflow concerning comparing object for equality in unit test. The poster basically wants to get rid of series of assertions like this:
CategoriesDevelopment
Tags.net, c#, nunit, stackoverflow, unit-test
June 10, 2013
I can’t say I like all the aspects of Microsoft ASP.Net MVC. But there is one aspect that I like though is the ability to unit test most of the components of your application. Standard ASP.Net did not prevent you from testing your application. However, the framework and documentation did not encourage you to organize
June 3, 2013
In my previous post about XPathNavigator, I explained in what circumstances the default implementation of XPathNavigator is troublesome. I went over the design of the class and highlighted how that design helps us re-implement XPathNavigator to address the issue. Testing XPathNavigator First things first, before attacking the new implementation proper, we want to make sure
CategoriesUncategorized
May 24, 2013
This post is the first in a series of posts related to XPathDocument and XPathNavigator. I will highlight the qualities and drawbacks of the standard .Net implementations and go through the design and development of a new implementation that fits better to my needs. First, what is an XPathDocument ? An XPathDocument is used when you
CategoriesDevelopment
May 24, 2013
Writing code is fun. At least it is for me. But sometimes it gets irritating. You know, you’re busy on something, you write the code, you know it’s right but it doesn’t work… You keep your focus on that one piece of code you just wrote and it keeps on not working. Sometimes, the reason
CategoriesUncategorized
April 30, 2013
The guys at http://www.greenheartgames.com/ pulled a nice trick yesterday. Just the day after they released their game development simulation game Game Dev Tycoon, they also uploaded a cracked version of the game for the pirates. What the heck ! What for ? Well, this cracked version is the same as the original game except the
April 13, 2013
Probably the best feature introduced by C++11 is std::unique_ptr. It will automagically make sure your dynamically allocated objects are deleted when you don’t use them anymore. In previous versions of C++, you needed to rely exclusively on documentation and conventions to ensure dynamically allocated memory was handled properly. With C++11, you can ask the compiler
CategoriesDevelopment
Tagsc++, c++0x, c++11, unique_ptr
April 12, 2013
I was evaluating boost::serialization today. Based on the design goals mentioned in the library’s introduction, I felt like boost::serialization would suit my needs. An interesting point is this : 8. Orthogonal specification of class serialization and archive format. That is, any file format should be able to store serialization of any arbitrary set of C++
CategoriesDevelopment
March 27, 2013
Today, I came across a confusing compilation error with MS VC++ using a std::unique_ptr with a custom deleter. Here the code snippet:
CategoriesDevelopment
Tagsc++, c++0x, c++11, vc++, visual studio
September 15, 2012
Today, I was trying to animate a menu-like view so that it slides out of a bar of buttons at the bottom of my application. Easy enough, I read some documentation about animations here. And I end up with code similar to this in the controller responsible for the sliding view:
September 8, 2012
While I was working on a small iPhone application I was required to put a search box but with a transparent background. The original design looks like this: I could not get the basic search control to not display its background. I tried using a standard text box, however the look and feel was not
CategoriesMobile Development
July 16, 2012
I am a newbie with mobile application development. As I start fiddling around, I find it is not exactly straightforward to setup an Android development environment for the first time. This post tries to take you through the few steps required before you can run a very first Android application. Installing Eclipse First you want
CategoriesMobile Development