Release small I just read a post by Tom Preston-Werner entitled ‘Readme-Driven Development’. This reminds me of some thoughts that I wanted to blog about. I’ve had a few projects that I thought would be pretty simple to do but turned out to be a little more complicated than expected. Rather than hunker down and churn through the whole hairy…

Javascript as a data manipulation language If you are like me you’ve been working with data in various forms for your whole programming career. Sometimes we have big datasets locked away in relational databases or complex content management systems. Other times we’re dealing with ad-hoc data from spreadsheets or web portals. Ironically it can be the larger data that are…

In defense of the Storarray I just ran across an old DailyWTF article again, courtesy of Hacker News. I’m pretty sure that I read the article when it first ran in 2006 when I was working for a government contractor. Back then I used to devour DailyWTF, Slacker Manager, Lifehacker and a raft of other blogs through Google Reader. It…

Transforming JSON to XML using Mustache I had the need recently to take a deeply-nested JSON structure and transform it to a relatively flat XML file. Ideally I wanted the equivalent of XPath for JSON, where I could have flattened a nested structure like this: [ { name: form1, fields: [ ... ] }, { name: form1, fields: [ ...…

Release: Javascript XML serialization library I’m working on a project that will access MS CRM directly via Javascript. Microsoft uses SOAP web services as their API protocol, and arguments have to be in a very particular XML format. I couldn’t find anything off-the-shelf that would allow complex SOAP calls, so I started hacking. Part of the solution turned into a…

Io on .NET No, I didn’t mis-title this post. I’m not talking about I/O , I’m talking about Io . Io is a dynamic programming language whose message-oriented syntax shares some similarity with Smalltalk and whose prototypal object system is similar to that of Javascript. I’m thinking a lot about metaprogramming these days, trying to encode functionality as data as…

Limitations of C# dynamic I’ve been using the new dynamic keyword along with anonymous types recently, but I think that these features kind of miss the mark. Anonymous types aren’t dynamic at all — they just define the type implicitly — you can’t add new items at runtime. However you can use the DLR’s ExpandoObject if you want to be…

Refactoring to domain-specific languages Today I was adding new functionality to a library of Microsoft CRM functions that I’ve been building up to make performing queries more manageable, when I realized that I was duplicating a lot of code between different query types. For example, we might want to construct a query that has a simple filter on it that…

Stupid .NET serialization tricks I’ve been meaning to write up a few things about .NET serialization that I’ve come across recently. I have a basic set of maneuvers for getting the XML output to look like you need it to in the case that you are trying to use some .NET data structures as the basis for writing out some…

Code reading: Google Chrome Speed Dial I’m thinking about starting a new series of posts where I write a few interesting details about some source code that I’ve read recently. From time to time I come across something unexpected or noteworthy, and in any case I put it in my notes — so why not post it up here? On…