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…

Coordinating software development with CruiseControl I ordinarily don’t write about my client work here, but since it pertains to good software engineering practices in general, I wanted to publish this article here on my main blog. I initially titled this post “Continuous integration with CruiseControl”, but what I’m describing isn’t full-fledged CI , although it incorporates many of its tenets.…

Observations about Javascript performance I just posted my js1k entry, and while I was doing the final rain dance of getting things down to 1024 bytes and testing in all of the major browsers (with the notable exception of IE) I noticed a few things about performance in the different browsers. 1) Javascript object allocation in Firefox is slower than…

Javascript minimization I recently had to cram nearly 3k of Javascript code down into 1024 bytes for submission to the js1k competition. Initially I didn’t think that I’d get there, but I did. Once I stripped out all comments and log statements I still had over 2k of code. Here are a few things that helped me out: 1) Run…

Making rich text possible on mobile devices This post is an overview of the techniques used in a rich text editor for mobile devices that I’m working on called Richie . I’m focusing on the iPhone first, followed by the iPad and other devices. As mobile devices evolve and increase in popularity I think we’ll be doing more of the…

Updated: Jath Javascript XML processor I just pushed some updates to the Jath template-based XML processor. The new version adds support for including literal values in the templates and most importantly (for me, right now) support for processing files under Windows Script Host. I’m going to be using this to churn through tons of exported CRM config data soon, so…

Increase project velocity, decrease cost of change I’ve been thinking a bit lately about project management topics and how they relate to customer expectations. I realize that this is quite a broad topic sentence, and I’m only going to dive into a few very specific things here, but hopefully I can keep expanding these ideas in a series of posts.…