Technical documentation: how and what to write

In the past couple of years I’ve written quite a lot of documentation, be it functional, technical, help files for end-users, flyers, proposals and much more. Most developers I know try to avoid writing these kind of things as much as they can, but let’s face it, it is part of our job. At the moment I’m working in a team with pretty smart and experienced developers, but as it goes, one of our team members has been placed on an other team at a different customer and I was asked to replace him. Read more →

Expression trees, delegates, functors how and why to use them

As of two weeks ago I’ve had the privilege to start doing some development work in a project where a lot of expression trees are used and most classes have at least one implementation of a Func delegate. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it’s something which dates from the .NET 3.0 era if I’m not mistaken, so every .NET 3.5 certified/professional developer should know the existence of them. Downside is, if your only real experience with the matter is reading them up in a text book, there’s a big chance you have forgotten on how and why to use it. Read more →

SharePoint and the Local Activation permission on DCOM objects on 2008R2

Another SharePoint farm installation, another problem. I had to install SharePoint 2007 (don’t ask..) on a Windows Server 2008R2 development machine. This is quite doable, as long as you install Service pack 2 of SharePoint. I figured it would be no problem and just another install, like I’ve done a gazillion times before. Everything went quite well and because of the SSD disk, the installation didn’t take as long as I was used to. Read more →

Saving files from the web

A few weeks ago I had to create an application which would download files from several SharePoint libraries. I had just done a similar thing for a Windows Phone 7 application, so I could reuse most of the code. After running the application I received an awkward exception message which said: “This stream does not support seek operations”. This exception was triggered by the following code snippet:https:// HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest. Read more →

New desktop setup

It’s been about 8 or 9 years since I’ve bought a new desktop system for myself. You can imagine the desktop I had was pretty antique and didn’t run the newest software quite well. Running Windows 7 on the Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz and a ATI Radeon 9800XT was a pain. Even running Windows XP SP3 was a starting to be a bit too much for the system. Most of the time I’m buying a system I don’t need to upgrade too much in the future, perhaps some extra memory, but that’s about it. Read more →