//www.ryanclarke.net/ Recent content on Ryan Clarke Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us © 2019 Ryan Clarke Tue, 05 Nov 2019 19:45:00 -0500 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/3-reasons-to-use-f-sharp/ Tue, 05 Nov 2019 19:45:00 -0500 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/3-reasons-to-use-f-sharp/ Picking the best programming language is difficult because we can’t just pick the one with the largest goodness number. Obviously, these objective goodness numbers are the easiest and most reliable way to find the best language, but someone neglected to assign them. Instead we individually convert our time slowly into experiences and our experiences into understanding and our understanding into opinions. Then we add these thoughtfully-honed opinions to all the other ones we’ve created in the heat of debate as the need arose. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/in-praise-of-file-new-project/ Sat, 06 Feb 2016 10:58:00 -0500 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/in-praise-of-file-new-project/ Have you ever read one of those books which promises to level up your dev skills but “I’m awesome, be like me” seems to be the author’s main message? I’m sorry, this may be a post like that. They say you can learn a lot from failure. I believe we can learn more from success, that success has more potential lessons, if we would only be as reflective with success as with failure. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ Fri, 17 Jul 2015 19:11:19 -0400 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ We programmers are notoriously horrible at user interface design. Regardless of whether this stereotype is fair, I’m sure we can all think of awful user interfaces we’ve been forced to use or, at least, see. In spite of this aknowledged lack of skill, we are regularly called on to design the user interfaces of the software we write. Joel Spolsky noticed this problem all the way back in 2001 and wrote a book to help us. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/the-book-of-f-sharp/ Sat, 13 Jun 2015 11:00:14 -0400 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/the-book-of-f-sharp/ I really like LINQ. LINQ is the functional side of C#, and it’s my favorite part. I love making extension methods so I can keep the dot-chain going. Naturally I was interested in F#. It’s the “functional C#”, right? This book starts great in chapter 1 with getting setup and ‘writing’ a first app. Happily, it was not another boring “Hello World”: it was a full Reverse Polish Notation calculator! It took up half a page and looked delightfully strange to my C# trained eyes: there were so many things I didn’t understand. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/peopleware/ Wed, 25 Mar 2015 20:30:10 -0400 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/peopleware/ Last week I was sick. So I curled up on the couch and read Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Larry Price’s fantastic review the week before moved it from unknown to the top of my reading list. It helped while away the uncomfortable hours. And not just while the hours away: it made them fly. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I kept turning pages until I had finished the entire volume in a single sitting. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/my-year-as-an-apprentice-software-engineer/ Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:00:00 -0500 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/my-year-as-an-apprentice-software-engineer/ The unlikely programmer Music theory was my ‘thing’ from the time I was 10, so naturally that’s what I studied in college. Years later I found programming and, realizing a better thing when I saw one, I switched ‘things.’ After attending the Institute of Whatever the Search Results Contained for a couple years, I decided to ask for help. I went to a meetup: Indianapolis Code and Coffee (SoHo Cafe, Thursdays at 7am). //www.ryanclarke.net/post/xaml-to-image/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 10:19:31 -0500 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/xaml-to-image/ I needed to take a xaml view and turn it into a bitmap. My Windows Phone app needed a live tile and the so I used FlipTileData with the BackgroundImage property set to my image URI. Almost every app has a tile so how hard can it be? Good news, it isn’t hard! Here’s how I turned the xaml view for my tile into the image I needed. We’ll call this the starting point Your xaml should be a UserControl, which works really well with WriteableBitmap’s Render method which takes a UIElement as it’s first parameter. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/creating-a-pinned-site-live-tile-easily-and-without-pain/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 09:00:00 -0400 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/creating-a-pinned-site-live-tile-easily-and-without-pain/ The list of things a developer must add to their website is constantly growing. I’m not talking about the big things; I’m talking about the little stuff that would be stupid to leave out. For instance, favicons were introduced by Internet Explorer 5 in 1999 (they made it into the HTML 4.01 recommendation later that year). Your site would function just as well without a favicon but you would be crazy not to have one. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/pinned-site-live-tiles-belong-on-all-sites/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:00:00 -0400 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/pinned-site-live-tiles-belong-on-all-sites/ Imagine if you could take your existing website and turn it into an app with minimal effort. Of course, that’s impossible. But you can get 75%* of the way there with an awesome new Internet Explorer feature I recently implemented on one of SEP’s sites called Pinned Site Live Tiles. What are Pinned Site Live Tiles? I am sure you are familiar with live tiles. They first came with the launch of Windows Phone and now are a defining feature of Windows 8+ as well. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/checked-multi-choice-listviews/ Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/checked-multi-choice-listviews/ I was building an Android ListView in an AlertDialog.Builder that allowed multi-choice. It displayed a list of accounts and you could select the one or more you wanted to operate on. I also needed to be able to set certain accounts as checked by default. I couldn’t use the built in AlertDialog.Builder(context).setMultiChoiceItems() method because it only accepts an array of strings of display data and I needed a custom list item view with the more complex AccountSummary object. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/using-factories-for-cleanliness-in-android-testing/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/using-factories-for-cleanliness-in-android-testing/ I am on a team building a native Android app for a local credit union. We are doing some really cool stuff around testing with unit tests, automated instrumentation tests using spoon, and manual user experience testing. We are working in a low-ceremony, flow-based process with continuous client feedback. One tool we are using to greatly improve our test quality is factories. Android uses Java and so the very name “factory” on a Java project (for a credit union, no less) is probably making you think of BaseAbstractStrategyBuilderFactoryImpl and such, but such enterprisyness is not the case. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/you-have-to-start-somewhere/ Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/you-have-to-start-somewhere/ I started fresh in at SEP on Monday and by Tuesday the bananas were fresh out. Fellow new guy Jackson and I were tasked with our first project on Monday just before quittin’ time: update the internal résumé reporting website from ‘ancient’ to ‘tomorrow.’ It currently runs on a mid-2006 vintage copy of Ruby on Rails (version 1.1.6). We’re supposed to be bringing it up to Rails 4 (coming soon, 2013) but some fundamental pieces of its inner-working were axed from Rails by the end of 2006. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/6-tips-for-maximum-adventure-between-20-and-28/ Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/6-tips-for-maximum-adventure-between-20-and-28/ Advice on Your 20th Birthday from the Perspective of 28 Years Dear Friend, The decade which you now commence is fraught with adventure. When I was 20, I had lived my entire life in a conservative Christian environment. I was homeschooled, and I earned my bachelor’s at Verity Institute. I was a well-learned kid. Since then I have held 8 job titles at 5 departments of 3 companies in 3 states. //www.ryanclarke.net/post/bending-linq-to-entities-to-my-will/ Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/bending-linq-to-entities-to-my-will/ I am building an ASP.NET MVC 4 application using Entity Framework as my ORM on top of an existing SQL Server database. This is model-first, not code-first. I am fairly new to Linq-to-Entities. Recently I ran into something that gave me many problems and I had great trouble finding any help online. I’ve now solved it, twice. This is my story. I have a view that need to display a list of Modules (as in, classroom teaching). //www.ryanclarke.net/post/how-to-join-t-mobile-monthly4g/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 //www.ryanclarke.net/post/how-to-join-t-mobile-monthly4g/ T-Mobile is offering customers an incredible catch-22… I mean, deal. I have wanted a Windows Phone for a year now but could not justify paying a smartphone-priced cell plan. So when I saw T-Mobile’s \$30 per month online-only plan I pounced. My Windows Phone dreams would happen–and all while saving \$20 over my current Verizon plan. But it’s all a cruel trick and the system is broken. You see, the deal is only on the web, so I couldn’t buy the \$20 in-store SIM card kit since they don’t let SIM kits walk out inactivated.