I guess this tool needs no introduction. Whether you know it or not, go grab it (R# homepage)

I have recently started learning Ruby On Rails to see what's out there that I don’t know I might be missing. There’s been a lot of hype about RoR for some time and I finally decided to have a peek at “the other side”. Anyway I have had some trouble today with running

rake db:migrate

command. It kept throwing at me some weird error (weird since I”m not accustomed to RoR environment yet). Fortunately I could easily guess that the problem is related to the fact that I just updated my MySQL instance to the latest version.

I tried to google the error msg but got a lot of old forum posts. Finally I bumped on this site http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8271#p30240 and there was the answer.

What appears to work is a following solution:

1) Download the previous version of MySQL (the no-installer/ZIP package)

2) Copy the \bin\libmysql.dll file to the directory where your ruby.exe file is.

3) You’re done. It should work fine.

I’m assuming the problem exists only for those running RoR on Windows platform. Seems that just the binary MySQL gem does not support the latest version of the server yet. I’m not sure, but on Linux you probably can just build the gem from sources. On Windows it’s just a lot harder (from what I have heard).

Anyway, hope this helps.

About 2 days ago I have updated my IE7 with the latest version. There is some buzz about it and from what I have expirienced it really feels faster and smarter.

From what I have read it is uninstallable if you don’t like it and that’s what convinced me to give it a try.
BTW. I am running it on Vista 32-bit and had no problems except some weird behaviour from sourceforge.net.

Anyway you should give it a try, it is faster, smarter (more hints that don’t get into your way), updates nicely from IE7 and even my favorite add-in (IE7Pro) still works fine, UPDATE: there seems to be some problem with restoring last session.

I can’t really tel if it takes more RAM, but even if it did I value speed over memory usage (RAM is cheap ;-)

It is still too early to give it a final glory, but I expect to like it even more and make more frequent use of IE in may dayily surfing (currently Opera is my 1st choice with Firefox as 2nd).
Till now I’ve tried to avoid IE as much as possible, but this might change with IE8 :)

I have recently become interest in TDD (Test Driven Development). I thought it’s a shame that a developer with a couple of years of experience knows very little about it. It just happens that I never had a chance to work for a company that embraced TDD – it turns out it’s not so easy to find an agile/tdd company after all (not that easy to sell it to your PM).

So I finally decided to drink the cool aid on my own ;-P

Actually I have been inspired by a guy I interviewed a while ago. He said he’s been practicing TDD at work and he’s been the only one in his team to do so.

It never occured to me that one could to that, but after a few presentations I have seen and as I started to look more into TDD I decided it was a good idea regardless of whether your team does see the benefit or not. Of course there a are a few things to work out to make it possible like: testing framework depency, your version control system, etc. but it’s possible and a quite good choice if you want to deliver better code and the rest of your team is not particulairly interrested in learning TDD.

I’m wondering if there are many people that also do this type of thing or what do the real TDD gurus think about it.

Would you drink the cool aid on your own?

Microsoft has recently released a new version of Code Contract library.

This will be a part of .NET 4.0 so it’s definitely worth looking at.

Make sure you go and see this video http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/2/9/4/7/5/4/mikescontractstutorial_2MB_ch9.wmv

It’s been quite a while since I started this blog and published my last post. I’ve been quite busy and many interresting things have happend in the meantime that I would like to share. I hope some will bring up interesting discussions with even more interresting insights, arguments and opinions.

I’ve tried to come up with some structured form for this blog, but couldn’t think of anything that would be suitable yet. I hope that over time it will either take some nice form naturally or I will finally come up with some good idea that will work well.

Enough this non-technical stuff for now, stay tuned for some interrresting posts soon!

If you haven't started using RSS readers yet you should definitely give a try the latest Snarfer version.

A bit of interesting info about it includes:

- custom SQL engine (to be ensure great speed)

- plugins (Reading List, Bloglines & Google Reader syncing and more)

Finally the best: it's FREE!

Go ahead and do yourself a pleasure by navigating to www.snarfware.com and you probably won't regret.

It's been a few days now, but it's really worth mentioning.

I'm sure all Opera lovers already appreciate this new 9.5 version.

The killer feature for me in this release is Opera Sync (actually I even started using beta version for this feature) which will sync items between your many Opera instances/installations. Those items include of course bookmarks, personal bar items, notes and speed dial. Very very cool feature. I think I'll be leaving del.icio.us at some point.

If you haven't tried the best browser on Earth do this now by visiting www.opera.com

Last Monday (02.06.2008) a very interesting event took place in Wrocław.
I mean the Heroes Community Launch conference which has been organised by a local .NET community.

I must say guys did an awesome job!
We had great speakers: lots of give-aways and some contests.
Everything was carefully planned and actually went went very, very well.

Among speakers we had:
- Tadeusz Golonka who is a big name in Polish software development market and we were very happy to have him doing a key note on where we are in software development now
- Naveen Garg who has been working for Microsoft for over 16 years
- Chris Koening who is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas

I personally have chosen to attend the Visual Studio path (SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 were the other two) to see some sessions on topics like Web 2.0, WPF, TDD and massive web portals scalability by Jakub Krzych, Szymon Kobalczyk, Michał Brzozowski and Maciej Grzyb.

Jakub and Maciej work for Making Waves where they build very cool thing called Second Brain which I strongly encourage you to check out.

If you missed the event you can see some photos here: http://wrocnet.org/photos/hcl_02-06-2008/default.aspx

Also you may want to have a look at Wrocław's HCL event site: http://heroes.wroclaw.pl to get some more info o sessions and speakers as well as Wrocław .NET User Group site: http://wrocnet.org/.

To sum up I think this was a great success and I'm really looking forward to seeing more, so you should better stay tuned keeping your eye on what's going on in Wrocław ;-)

Hi and welcome to my blog!

My name is Piotr Owsiak (Piotr is polish equivalent for Peter :-) and I'm an ASP.NET developer with several years of experience in programming, mostly in .NET and ASP.NET particularly.

After many years of just taking it finally came time to give back to the community. Hopefully you will find some interesting and valuable content here.
Just to give you, dear reader, a bit of ahead what's coming and what this blog is about. I'm going to write about my IT experiences, some of my thoughts and opinions and recommendations, some findings, bugs and problems I came across and last but not least I will share a list of great tools I use with you.

So, not to make this longer than necessary,
welcome and stay tuned.

Piotr Owsiak