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Creating a simple Windsor facility

April 11, 2007 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.

Wired magazine discusses the See-Through CEO

April 9, 2007 Wired magazine has a very good article this month titled the See-Through CEO. Interestingly, two members of our technical team forwarded this article to me this morning. A few gems from the article: The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners. Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your…

Dovetail employees speaking at Austin Code Camp 2007

The Austin.NET User Group is sponsoring Austin Code Camp 2007 on May 5th. Last year's camp was excellent, and it's not too late to register for what's sure to be another great code camp. There are multiple sessions being led by Dovetail Software staff:  Bret Pettichord from Dovetail Software Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby - Learn how to write automated acceptance tests for web applications in this hands-on tutorial. We’ll show you how to use the Watir testing tool and the Ruby scripting language to create tests that drive Internet Explorer. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll have written several tests using an open-source tool popular with agile teams. Bring a Windows laptop with W2K, XP, or Vista. We'll provide the software. No knowledge of Watir or Ruby is assumed. (Level 200) Kevin Miller from Dovetail Software MonoRail Introduced…

Corporate transparency and accessibility

March 30, 2007 I wrote a blog post a few months ago on our internal blog server (before we had external blogs): A lot has been written recently on the business value of transparency, and it's really struck a chord with me. I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, and it's a consistent theme in his blog and his books. Companies being transparent with their customers, prospects, and employees. Bloggers being transparent about their product reviews. Examples of the power of transparency, as well as the effects of being non-transparent, are everywhere. Dell publicly acknowledging their shortcomings, and openly discusses what they're doing to improve. Apple doing the exact opposite. Etc. I saw a new level of transparency today at Wesabe: Talk to Jason. Right there, on the front page on their website, in a very prominent position, is a phone number, email…

Dovetail Software is Hiring

March 29, 2007 Dovetail Software is now hiring for the following positions: Clarify Developer Technical Support Engineer/Junior Developer Agile Software Developers   Clarify Developer We're looking for talented, motivated individuals to contribute to the development of our existing Clarify-based applications. Experience with Clarify/Amdocs products is required, and experience with Dovetail/First Choice products is preferred. Web development experience is required, including ASP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Email us and tell us why you’d make a great addition to our team: tech-jobs@dovetailsoftware.com   Technical Support/Junior Developer We're looking for individuals who are committed to wowing customers on a daily basis to be part of our technical support staff. Our support is one of our strengths as an organization, and a big part of our reputation. In addition to support responsibilities, you will have the opportunity to work with other members of our development staff to enhance our existing product…

Problem has been resolved. User is an idiot.

March 27, 2007     I was working a support case today, and the customer closed his own case with the following remarks:   *** CASE CLOSE 3/27/2007 12:03:27 PM websupport Problem has been resolved. User is an idiot <---written by user.     I love it when people aren't afraid to admit they made a mistake and poke a little fun at themselves. Certainly made me laugh!