My problem with Heroku

We've all been hearing a lot about Heroku lately. In fact, it seems that almost every rails blog has a post about how you "must use Heroku!' or you're an idiot to not using Heroku. Over the last month or so, I've been working on a project hosted on Heroku. Now this app has a lot of issues including code written by a billion developers that is often stupid or redundant and inconsistent staging and production code, schema, and data. Needless ...

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Rails is awesome … too bad the creater and much of the community are total dickwads.

In a moment of genuine unintended irony, I decided to start learning Rails at the exact moment that a huge uproar happened over a conference presentation that contained pornographic images and the following "don't hamper my freedom from expression/to look at naked chicks" response from much of the Rails community. Worse yet, DHH, creator of Rails and partner in 37 Signals, condoned the talk. (more…)

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Configuring WCF with BasicHttpBinding and SSL

Posted on April 14, 2009

Despite a variety of posts on this topic, I had to go through a bunch of articles just to get what seemed to be a simple task.I started with this post How to setup a WCF service using basic Http bindings with SSL transport level security. The post gives a good explanation of how to get a ssl certificate and set up IIS to use the certificate. In my case, I just wanted to use SSL and not credentials. So I modified the web.config like this: ...

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Getting random rows from Sql Server

Posted on February 3, 2009

I'm working on a project where I want to return related content. The sproc I wrote seems to work ok but because I was sorting by the insert date or the title, it would always return the same thing for all content closely associated.So how do I get it to return only the closely related content AND randomize it?Here is the what I did: SELECT * FROM #tmpRelated JOIN Content c ON r.ContentID = c.ContentID ORDER BY r.TotalRelevance DESC, ...

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Neat way to handle Nullable types …

Posted on January 27, 2009

Ever since I read Rick Strahl's blog post on the C# ?? operator, I've been in love with the C# ?? operator. Mostly I use it as a clean way to test a ViewState variable for null in a property. For example, protected string stringToPersistOnPostBack { get { return (ViewState[this.ClientID + "_stringToPersistOnPostBack"] ?? "").ToString();< } } Somewhere along the way, the real purpose of the ?? operator was ...

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