Events

Parker is both feeling a lot better and a lot worse. In the "better" column we have his incision looking great, him putting more weight on the repaired leg, and him figuring out how to navigate with the Cone of Shame. In the "worse" column we have listlessness, sleep disruption, and depression from the drugs, the lack of exercise, and the Cone of Shame. His surgeon followed up with me yesterday and said this is perfectly normal. I'm still watching him closely, but I'm happy how things are going. He gets...

We're up to day 6 of Blogging A-to-Z challenge, FFS. The last few days I've written about the two main object-oriented languages that come with Visual Studio and .NET: C# and VB.NET. Today I want to diverge just a little into Microsoft's functional language, F#. At first glance, F# looks a lot like C#. It is, in fact, a flavor of C#; and as it runs on the .NET CLR, it uses .NET constructs. But as Microsoft says, "F# is a programming language that provides support for functional programming in addition...

No, not the Dunning of Kruger fame; Dunning, the community area on the far northwest side of Chicago. Workers building a new school in the neighborhood discovered that not only was it the former site of a poor house, but also that 38,000 people may be buried there: “There can be and there have been bodies found all over the place,” said Barry Fleig, a genealogist and cemetery researcher who began investigating the site in 1989. “It’s a spooky, scary place.” Workers have until April 27 to excavate and...

Welcome to day 5 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. In object-oriented design, we talk about a number of basic concepts that make code easier for humans to read and maintain. Encapsulation is fundamental, by hiding the internal data of a class so that only the class can use it. To access data within the class, you can't just reach in and grab it; you need to use the public properties and methods of the class. Here's a stupid class: #region Copyright ©2018 Inner Drive Technology using System; using...

Cone of shame, shaved leg, drugged out of his mind: that's my boy. But at least he's home: As I've been saying, the next few weeks will be rough. But he's going to get lots of attention, especially between now and Monday. And then there's this: He has physical pain, I have psychic pain. All because he ran up some stairs too fast. Again: ouch.

Welcome to day 4 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. After yesterday's more theoretical post on the CLR, today will have a practical example of how to connect to data sources from C# applications. Almost every application ever written needs to store data somewhere. If you're deploying a .NET website into Microsoft Azure (like this blog), you will probably connect it to an Azure SQL Database. Naturally, Visual Studio and C# make this pretty easy. Here's the code that opens up a database connection and...

Whew. Parker is just fine. The surgeon said everything went very well. She reported he completely tore his meniscus and his right CCL (the doggy equivalent of a human's ACL), and it looked like the result of an acute injury, not age-related deterioration. This is good news because it means he has a much lower risk of doing this to his left leg than we worried about. He's recuperating from the operation right now and will remain overnight for observation. He should be home after lunch tomorrow, with a...

Parker did not have a good morning. I woke him up early, then "forgot" to feed him, and wouldn't even let him lick the cream cheese off my knife when I had a bagel right in front of him. All he got was an unpleasant-tasting amino supplement and a pain pill. He did get a ride in the car, though, which might have gotten his mind off his appetite. But then he got unceremoniously carried up two flights of stairs (the elevator at the pet hospital was out of order) and handed off to someone who smelled like...

Day 3 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to the heart of .NET: the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Microsoft defines the CLR as the run-time environment which "runs the code and provides services that make the development process easier." That isn't the most helpful definition, so let me try to elaborate. As I described Sunday and yesterday, the .NET compiler takes your source code from C# or whatever other language you use and compiles it down to one or more managed modules containing...

Yesterday, the Nielsen Norman Group released groundbreaking research on user interface design for dogs: There are several key usability guidelines that help dogs to have the most usable experience on modern websites and apps, particularly on mobile, tablet, and other touch-based interfaces: Consistency is critical. While consistency in any user experience is important, with dogs, it’s even more so. Experienced dog trainers will tell you that, for dogs to learn proper behavior, consistency in enforcing...