Recently I've developed a love for F# and functional programming principals in general. Something about the way I code in those languages makes the code just seem to work the first time. After a short break from c# I came back to it for a project at work and noticed my c# code was just working the first time too. Curious to know why I started reviewing my recent code and found a primary reason for this is a reduced amount of intermediate variables and far greater usage of LINQ's higer order functions a[...]

We have multiple environments where a website needs to be deployed and I've been tinkering with Jenkins trying to find a better way to handle the process. In this post I'll walk through how to create a Jenkins build tasks and then subsequent deploy tasks that take as a parameter a specific Jenkins build so that you're guaranteed to deploy the same binaries across your environments. Jenkins is an open source continuous integration server written on the jvm. It's a mature product with loads of plugins and[...]

In the first part of the series I waked through how I came upon Metaprogramming and IronPython in particular. I also showed some simple examples with it. In this post I'll be going through creating a Deserializer with IronPython and hopefully learning something along the way. In case you missed part 1 it's available here Metaprogramming with IronPython - Part 1 Introducing our interface The interface we'll be using in this test is the IDeserializer interface from Seekwell using System.Collections.[...]

While writing Seekwell there were several ideas that came and went trying to optimize the deserialization from IDataReader to IEnumerable<T>. The minimum viable product was to simply use reflection. That of course was slow so we cached as much of the reflection as we could. What if we created a deserializer that would write code to do the deserialization for a given type? The .net framework has several ways of essentially compiling code at runtime. Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider and System.Reflec[...]

We have years worth of historical queue data in a Microsoft Sql database and the same tables that contain this historical data also keep track of pending or currently active work. Here's a highly simplified visual example. TypeSubtypeStatusParameters ExportEmailComplete"From: noreply@foo.com, To: someone@bar.com" ImportExcelActive"FilePath: c:\import.xls" ImportWebPending"Url: http://google.com" This structure leaves us with several issues: Contention: To handle volume we have many windows serv[...]