dboyle

Ok, that should more accurately read “used” or even “abused" - as most of these have only enterd my domain when required by a job or college course. However some have been a major part of life over a much longer periods - C++, C# and...

I took and passed this exam this morning and am feeling quite happy with myself. It is the first of the three exams which are building blocks towards the Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (Windows Store Apps) certification, but on it’s own...

So this was actually asked of me once in an "interview style" situation and it took me quite a while to twig that the use of a queue would be required. I can't fully remember the wording of the question but it was basically something like this: "For every...

So recently somebody asked about this and seemed surprised when I said that owing to the availability of lots of lists and collection classes in modern frameworks, I had not coded a linked list in a couple of decades, at least not since I completed my...

Ok, looking back at the original post I'm nearly regretting it as I need to find the time to actually write these - but at least this one was quick and simple. In fact it may be too simple to use as a tech test, but anyways here it is. A prime number...

Back in my original college days (over 20 years ago now) this used to be the subject of a running joke. It seemed that with every new language learned one of the first exercises was to check for palindromes, and the joke was that we couldn't wait to get...

Along with Mergesort, Bubblesort and others, Quicksorting of arrays is a standard on any fully fledged undergraduate computer science course. It’s a simple theory, and like a lot of theories can be easily described verbally, on a whiteboard or even...

It's worth repeating the wikipedia definition for GCD here, as it's explains it well: "The greatest common divisor (gcd), also known as the greatest common factor (gcf), or highest common factor (hcf), of two or more non-zero integers, is the largest...

This is a simple data structure, but again one with which many of us may have not been familiar with in some time. But it seems to beloved of tech screeners (and very useful in networking software) so a refresher is always nice; I have here put together...

Continuing the series of "things you may have done in college" this next one is all about array manipulation. Again it's one I've heard of being used in a whiteboard/tech interview situation (so worth brushing up on!). The scenario here is just the creation...

This was a nice challenge, and while I have here a version that works, I have certainly not tested it extensively. After much pondering and barking up the wrong tree on a whiteboard I started playing with code and slowly it dawned on me that there are...

This topic has come up in my circles lately. Actually I've found myself more than once in discussions on the best way to interview technical people and it seems that many many people are of the opinion that the old ones are still the best - i.e. the same...

I passed this exam today, on my second attempt. MS description is here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=MB2-866. It's actually my first Microsoft certification. Getting to these exams is something about which I have had great intentions...

So I've blogged already about my first Windows 8 app and how I got the background task to update my live tiles. But for me one of the coolest things about Windows 8 App development is how amazingly easy it is to integrate with other apps. Some things...

My first Windows 8 app has a "Live Tile". To update this live tile I have a background task. The scenario is as follows: My app "Irish Tides" pulls tide height and time prediction values back from a website. The user can chose between 130 different ports...

We've all written some html over the years (ok, in my case not so much), and maybe we all have our own standards, and most likely our standards differ. My test automation had to crawl through a product which is in effect a fairly large website, capturing...

Readers of some of my other posts will have gathered by now that my day job involves work on a large test automation harness. Some may also know that that my current project involves the saving of screenshots and their respective html during test case...

Working in test automation sometimes involves more than just working towards good infrastructure, harnesses and cases. I have produced a side product (by-product?) recently which allows translators to see the screens associated with new features and search...

I'm giving/gave (depending on when you read this) a short talk on building apps (mainly WP7, little bit of Win8) at the Career Zoo event in Dublin on 22nd September ( http://careerzoo.ie) . On the deck I use there are a number of links listed. Instead...

I’ve been working on some changes which involve both the additon of new projects as well as changes to some of the base layer projects in the depot. When it came to check-in time I discovered that the check-in automation and testing ran things in...

My first WP7 app was a little Rss reader for one of my favourite news sites. It’s quite easy to learn how to consume Rss feeds in a WP7 app. A quick search will throw up numerous samples including those on msdn ( https://dev.windowsphone.com/en...

The problem: I had an issue with entity updates from a CRM solution. I have a plug-in with a step registered on the Update event, fired by a jscript call to Save(). This allows me to trigger the plug-in manually with my own button. The feature requirement...

I have a prototype job tracking system based on CRM 2011. I’ve used job tracking systems and bugbases where reporting is a low point, but here we get the power of CRM reporting, dashboards and views; users are free to design their own private views...

Today I used remote desktop to connect to a Windows 8 PC for the first time and this posed 2 small but interesting challenges for Windows users with habits like mine: 1) How do I enable remote desktop on the Window 8 PC? So, as in previous Windows...

MSCRM does require a little bit of coding when we try to add form field values. A common scenario is the addition of two inputted field values to make a third calculated value. This is easily achieved by using the method "Xrm.Page.getAttribute('ATTRIBUTE...