Tag: Code
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Working with AI: A Human-Centered Approach to Code Collaboration
My coding pace slowed down; AI’s never does, and is getting faster. The trick is keeping it from “helping” too much – with good docs, clear prompts, and lots of patience. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with agentic coding AI—tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT that can read my code, suggest changes, and edit multiple files…
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AI as Your Pair Programmer: Sometimes Junior, Sometimes Peer, Sometimes Mentor
Or: Convincing Myself Our AI Overlords Aren’t Replacing Us (Yet) Introduction After 20 years in software development, I’ve seen the landscape shift – from debugging with print statements to navigating version control debates, and leaning on Stack Overflow like a trusted colleague. Now, a new kind of collaborator has joined the team: AI. What I’ve…
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Historical Timezones and Computing
The bug wasn’t in the code. It was buried in history. Every developer has a favorite edge case. Mine involves a birthday, a “bug”, and a timezone that no longer exists. Years ago, my colleague B and I supported a patient registration system for a healthcare group. One day, a tech-support case landed on our…
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Npgsql 8.0, Entity Framework Core and JSON POCOs
Npgsql 8.0 introduced NativeAOT and trimming support (hooray!), which necessitated explicit opt-ins to some dynamic coding practices that are incompatible with NativeAOT/trimming. One of these is JSON POCO mapping which I use quite heavily in some of my projects (boo! hiss!) As mentioned, though, it is opt-in via NpgsqlDataSourceBuilder introduced in Npgsql 7.0 or the…
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Email in Castle Monorail 2.0
Castle Monorail has been my web framework of choice for some years now. I’ve been using the obsolete RenderEmailAndSend method as that was how it is done in the sample code. Monorail 2.0 uses Core 1.2 which features an integrated email sender component, and the old sample code does not work any more since Castle.Components.Common.EmailSender.Message…
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Database Drivers not provided by Microsoft
Good post by Joseph Guadagno about database drivers not provided by Microsoft. He missed a few, though, so here they are: PostgreSQL PostgreSQL needs no introductions. Probably my favourite open source DBMS. Npgsql is de facto the ADO.NET provider. Performance and stability seems alright. PostgreSQLDirect .NET is a commercial provider, and is supposed to out-perform…
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Classic ASP High Jinks: Windows Script 5.7
It has been a long time since I touched any classic ASP, apart from the odd quick fix to legacy projects. Anyway, I recently helped a friend out with a project and was surprised to learn that there was an update to Windows Script, from 5.6 to 5.7. Wow! 5.6 shipped with XP, so it’s…
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SubSonic 2.0 Beta 3
Made another attempt to update the current project I am working on from SubSonic 1.0.6 to the newly released 2.0 Beta 3. The issue I had with Beta 1 is gone. Great job. As a public service, these were the things I needed to do for the update. Simple.
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SubSonic 2.0 Beta 1
SubSonic has shipped 2.0 Beta 1. I have used SubSonic (formerly ActionPack) in a few projects now and I have been waiting for this release. Very exciting. So I downloaded the zip file, updated the DLLs, web.config, compiled successfully. Went to the home page of the web application, so far so good. Datagrid, OK. Clicked…
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Brainfuck
Just found out about Brainfuck from Peter Schneider’s blog post about his Powershell brainfuck interpreter and compiler. Classed as an “esoteric programming language“. So subversive. And such an appropriate name. Created by Urban Müller in 1993, it has only eight commands. Wow! “Hello World!” looks like this: Needless to say, I will not be using it in…