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Author: Kevin Miller

Software Creator

Kevin Miller
Kevin Miller
About:

I am an Austin Texas based software developer flying his geek flag proudly. I work hard creating customer service and support software and web experiences. When I am not creating software or gushing about my toddler. I soak neck deep in Twitter, discover new music at Rdio, host "European" board game meet ups, and read nerdy stuff like Vernor Vinge.


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Posts by Kevin Miller:

Ruby Imports Agility Into Microsoft

May 1, 2007 As more details are flowing out of Mix07, the .Net world is a-buzz with dreams of Ruby On Rails and the dynamic goodness that can be hosted on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). I too am excited but for another reason entirely. Microsoft is showing signs of finally doing an Agile process right. include 'Agility' John Lam and the DLR team after exiting their quiet period have announced iterative code releases. From John's - Introducing IronRuby post: Finally, I apologize for being silent about what we've been doing in this space. But this is now full disclosure - so we will be working with the community in a fully open fashion from this point onwards. IronPython has a 3 week release cycle with a live repository (you'll be able to get changes the moment we check them in), and we're going to try…

Windsor Container Property Setter Injection

April 30, 2007     Hammet pointed out in the comments for Creating a simple Windsor facility that the whole premise of my TimeServiceFacility is silly.   Sorry, but I still don't get it why you used a facility to do that. You could get the same behavior by   - registering the timeservice as, well, a service - having writable properties on components, like you do on HasTimeServiceProperty class.   it will be "injected" in the same way.   Interesting exercise, though.   This post is an attempt to correct a wrong. Windsor will do Property setter injection out of the box. Just follow what Hammet said to do a viola you get the same thing.   Add the TimeService as service component to the container:   Container.Current.AddComponent('timeservice', typeof(ITimeService), typeof(TimeService)); Here is a test that proves setter injection is working for components resolved from the container…

Entity Framework Designer Will Not Be In Orcas RTM

April 23, 2007 We just got confirmation today from the ADO.Net team over at Microsoft that the EDM Designer will not be in the Orcas RTM bits. Had I been more diligent in reading their blog posts I would have noticed this earlier: EDM Wizard and Designer Featured in VSLive! San Francisco Keynote - Tuesday, March 27, 2007 8:42 PM by dpblogs These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release. There it is sitting there in bold print way back a month ago and I missed it. This is bad news as most of our reason for using EF was related to the designer being there for our customers. It seems that at Orcas RTM the only…

Monorail Screencasts

April 20, 2007 Colin Ramsay just posted an excellent series of screencasts on Monorail  to the Castle Project Users google group. He basically prepared the content of my talk at Austin CodeCamp for me so thank you Colin I owe you big! Keep the great screencasts coming. Colin's Screencasts Getting Started With Monorail - screencast   Using Monorail  - screencast   Databinding and ActiveRecord - screencast   Validation and Much more - screencast   CodeGenerator and ActiveWriter - screencast  Updated: added screencast #5 Photo by alandot

Subversion and Certificate Authorities

April 12, 2007 As I mentioned before we recently changed the URL of our subversion repository. We wanted to have a URL via SSL where our code could live for awhile. So I ventured over to InstantSSL.com and grabbed a 2 year certificate updated our DNS and life is good. No more of these right? svn up Error validating server certificate for 'https://svn.repository.com' - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use thefingerprint to validate the certificate manually!Certificate information:- Hostname: svn.repository.com- Valid: from Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:00:00 GMT until Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:59:59 GMT - Issuer: COMODO CA Limited, Salford, Greater Manchester, GB- Fingerprint: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently? This message is an annoyance at the user level and a huge waste of time when your have scripts or tools that start breaking because of it. The whole reason…

Code Formatting Plugin for Live Writer

April 11, 2007 I use Windows Live Writer for composing my blog posts. Gary Sherman just showed me his handy plug-in for formatting code in Live Writer. I got jealous so I looked into what was out there. The CodeFormatterPlugIn (english translation - download) is the best of two similar plug-ins for Live Writer I tried that that use the Manoli formatter library and it comes with a nice handy installer.   Results In: using System; namespace Dovetail.Utilities { public interface ITimeService { DateTime GetSystemTime(); } Community Server had trouble displaying the code until I stole Gary's CSS Overrides. Here are all the relevent css overrides: .CodeFormatContainer{ overflow:auto; border:solid 1px black; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd…

Creating a simple Windsor facility

Update: What this facility accomplishes is easily done using property setter injection in Windsor. Please use this post only as an example for creating a basic, yet misguided, facility. Windsor is an excellent inversion of control (IoC) container. Besides putting components into the container for use with dependency injection you can extend, customize, tweak, spindle, the behaviors of the container by adding facilities. Facilities expose events and information about what is going on with the container such as what is being added to it and what objects are being created by it. This viewport into the container lets you inject behavior into the lifecycle of objects springing forth from the container. All of this at first is very confusing but lends itself to powerful capabilities. The exercise I went through was to provide a TimeService as an aspect of our application. Normally developers use DateTime.Now…

Google Notebook

April 10, 2007 In preparation for my CodeCamp talk on MonoRail I have started using Google Notebook, and it's excellent accompanying Firefox extension, to compile an outline and notes on supporting materials for my presentation. At this point I am just playing with it but I love how the interface integrates with my browsing experience. Notebook is ever present sleeping down there in the status bar ready to capture my thoughts or clip content I want to coorelate with what I am working on. If I want to "clip" some content from a page I just highlight the text. Right click and... Bamm, you have a snippet of the content and a URL to get you back to the whole story. At the momment it seems like I will only have time to cover some basics of MonoRail it would be nice to get into some cool stuff…

How to change the URL of your SVN repository

We just changed our Subversion repository's url from something terrible with custom port number hideousness to a URL so clean, concise and georgeous that I became brain damaged.   The old URL still works but I wanted to repoint all my checked out code to the new URL. I tried switch and it didn't work until Bret mentioned that Eclipse had something called relocate for this issue. A google search later...   command line: svn switch --relocate  <from URL> <to URL> Tortoise SVN:     I should have known all of this and likely did at one point but it just fell out of my brain.

Google Desktop vs Outlook 2007

March 27, 2007 Yesterday Scott asked me if Google Desktop Search (GDS) works with Outlook 2007. I just started using the new Outlook so I didn't know. Let's settle this with a screenshot: I did a search in Outlook 2007 and found 2 hits. The Google Desktop Search widget returned 47. Which would you find more useful?