Why aren’t there generic properties in C#? I ran across something interesting today about the C# generics language feature and its underlying CLR support. While maintaining a library of helper functions I thought it would be nice to be able to index into a collection of mixed-type properties and cast the result using a type specified by a generic type…

Introducing Batbelt bootstrapper for Windows Superheroes always have their bag of tricks, able to pluck just the right tool for the job out of their bag. Unfortunately, this requires some suspension of disbelief and in real life we can’t have everything at hand all of the time. However, in the digital realm, can’t we have our cake and eat it…

MockCrm for testing MS CRM code I’ve been debating whether to release some code I’ve been playing with for a while for unit testing Microsoft CRM projects. I had hacked something together back in CRM 4 to test a project that was slow and tricky to test manually against a real CRM installation. But there wasn’t good test coverage on…

Code reading: ASP.NET MVC I’ve been looking around for a good RESTful API framework for .NET to possibly implement an API design that I’ll be working on soon. One of the things I’m considering (other than WCF) is using ASP.NET MVC as a Web service. I’m not going to go through the whole MVC codebase here, but I was digging…

Using Haskell with Microsoft .NET I’ve been learning some Haskell recently since I ran into people at the Hacker Dojo who are putting on Haskell events . After running through the basic tutorials the first thing I like to do is to try to get it working with another platform that I already know well. I’ve done this with Ruby…

JS1k Xmas Edition post-mortem I submitted an entry for the JS1k Xmas competition but I never posted anything about it here. I was very busy at the end of the year but one night I was feeling exhausted with everything so I sat down and started hacking around with some ideas for a Javascript game. An hour later I had…

Accessing Microsoft CRM from IronRuby In a fit of madness It crossed my mind to try to get data out of Microsoft CRM using Ruby. The reason isn’t important now, and I may blog about it later, but suffice it to say that I hoped that it would be possible to leverage the CRM SDK libraries in other .NET environments…

Browsers like RockMelt and Flock are Harmful to the Web I recently received a beta invite for the new RockMelt Web browser, which is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, of Marc Andreessen/Netscape fame. Naturally I was curious to see what they are working on, Andreessen knowing a thing or two about the browser market, having been instrumental in the birth of…

The URI as a Data Lingua Franca for the Web I just read Tim Berners-Lee’s piece in Scientific American about what makes the Web the powerful tool that it is and how certain forces threaten to jeopardize its power. One of the things that he mentions in the article is the increasing isolation of data on the Web. Whether we…

Fluent interfaces: Iterating on CRMQuery I wrote an article several months ago about a small internal DSL that I developed for creating Microsoft CRM QueryExpressions called CRMQuery . I released this project in its nascent state on GitHub in the hopes that it would be useful to others that are in the trenches digging data out of CRM with the…