Author Archives: James Thigpen

Accidental MVC

So this app I’m writing and maintaining at my day job. It accepts requests over this painful legacy protocol, performs some action based on that request, encodes the result in the same painful legacy protocol, and returns it to the … Continue reading

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Bing Me

We are naturally biased towards the things we are most familiar with.  Learning something involves an investment in it, and often times there is an emotional investment as well. We become attached emotionally to the things we’re constantly exposed to. … Continue reading

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Simple BDD Reporting with NUnit

I do BDD with just plain NUnit. I haven’t yet invested the time to mess with any of the frameworks like MSpec or whatever. I use a ContextSpecification class that I probably ripped off from someone long ago. Everyone in … Continue reading

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The Ugly Baby Project

I am announcing the Ugly Baby Project. It’s a simple thing I’ve decided to do to sort of compare and contrast Ruby on Rails, Django, and Ruby/Merb, and maybe ASP.NET MVC. I’m not sure about ASP.NET MVC. (I’m already familiar … Continue reading

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My First Experience With Django

I decided to pop open a copy of Live Writer and chronicle my first Django first impressions. It’s going to be a bit stream of consciousness. I’m working off this tutorial from Instant Django. The model creation seems relatively straightforward … Continue reading

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A New Beginning – Unit of Work, LLC

I have come to the conclusion that, professionally for a variety of reasons, it is time for me to move on. My current employer has been nothing but good to me, and I have learned a tremendous amount working here, … Continue reading

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Running Multiple Hudson Instances Simultaneously

I wanted to run multiple Hudson instances side-by-side. It was easy enough to get them running kicked off via batch files, but I wanted them to run as services, because I’m lazy and greedy. Turns out it’s easy, though non-obvious. … Continue reading

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Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

A sort of sequel to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, I am proud to be a signee of the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship: As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it … Continue reading

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Infinite List of Database Users with Yield Return

At the ALT.NET Seattle conference, I went to a session by Nate Kohari on the awesomeness of the yield return keyword in .NET and how you can use it for all kinds of fancy stuff. In the true spirit of … Continue reading

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Buba XPath Builder

This is the tool I reach for anytime I need to pull data out of XML’s cold bird-like claws. It let’s you interactively write XPath queries against an XML document. It’s simple. It works well. It’s got syntax highlighting. Basically, … Continue reading

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