franzone.com

I’ve been watching all of the hype about downloading and running the latest Google creation, ChromiumOS this week so yesterday I decided to take a stab at it myself. I did not however want to simply grab a VMWare image and run it. I’m a software engineer for Pete’s sake! I should build it myself. [...]

I had the desire to create an enumeration in C# the other day and I wanted to be able to attach a description to each item in the enumeration. I did the searching on the internets and put together examples from several sources that I found. Here is an example that ties it all together [...]

I’ve been a software engineer for over 10 years now and I’ll be the first to tell you that I can’t just pull any code snippet out of my… umm… brain. And there’s nothing wrong with that! The important thing is to be a good software engineer, a good problem solver; the rest is just [...]

The Problem
I recently had a problem. I am a software developer and as such I use source control. For this purpose I generally prefer Subversion. I have been keeping my source repositories on an external drive with the intention to back them up to another secure location periodically (yeah, that never happens). I looked into [...]

Cell phones are for the most part proprietary in their platforms. Sure you can write J2ME applications for them. BlackBerry phones also have an API which you can utilize to write custom applications. It’s the actual operating system though that you really can’t get too. Don’t care? Well, then this review isn’t for you. However, [...]

I am in Minneapolis, MN this week for business so I’m not sure how prolific my posting will be. So I thought I’d just drop in a quick note to say, “Happy Monday!” It’d be happier if I were back in my home office, but oh well. In the mean time you can check out [...]

Anyone who has been in software engineering can most likely recognize the old project triangle. The basic premise to this triangle is that in software engineering you may pick only two of the tips of this triangle.

You can create software quickly and cheaply but it will suffer quality.
You can have high quality quickly but it [...]

Here is the situation. You are writing a program in Java. You need to access data in a Microsoft SQL Server via stored procedure and the data has an XML field. A what field? SQL Server 2005 introduces a new datatype for XML. It is essentially a blob field that you can perform XML operations [...]

In the original posting, Conditional Statements And Comparison Order, I brought up a coding style used by some software engineers that struck me as odd. The practice of placing a constant value first in a conditional comparison. For example:

if("Some String" == aVariable) {
// Do some stuff
}
…

Listing 1
I never liked the way this reads [...]

I apologize ahead of time for this soap box, but I have just read the nth forum posting with a response like this. I have been a fairly flexible software engineer for the majority of my career and this means that I use many different programming languages. What language do you need? If I do [...]