I have grown a bit frustrated by the difficulty to gather information about local .Net development community events. Of all people, I am one of the best-positioned to hear about these events, because of my involvement with the San Francisco .Net user group, and yet, I routinely discover that I missed an event, because there is no clear place to go to get that information and I never heard about it.

So here we go – ladies and gentlemen, introducing NorCalWeekly.Net, your weekly serving of .Net events in north California! My goal will be to provide in one place, on a weekly basis, announcements for all upcoming .Net events in the area – so if you know of anything relevant taking place, please let me know! The design and features are somewhat minimalist for the moment, I’ll improve it over time.

I will be presenting “For Those About to Mock” on Tuesday, January 19th at the North Bay .Net user group in Sebastopol – and I am very excited about it, because it is my first time in this user group, and because I really enjoy the topic. As a long-time fan of TDD, I came across mocking a long time ago, but it took me a while to incorporate it in my daily code, not really because it’s complicated, but rather, because I didn’t quite understand what issue mocking frameworks were solving. Also, explanations on the topic are often fairly intimidating.

My goal will be to spare you the misunderstandings I went through, so that you understand where mocking can help you, and how to use frameworks like Rhino.Mocks and Moq in your own code. Hope to see you there, and if you have specific requests or questions you would want me to address, please let me know in the comments!

Event info here.

We software engineers like to overbuild at times. I have seen some traffic increase on this blog, sure, but nothing that the current xml backend can’t handle. On the other hand, hey, in case I see a 100-fold increase in the near future, then I’ll be happier if I have something more robust already in place, so I just followed Al Nyveldt’s tutorial and swapped to a MS SQL back-end – it went smoothly overall, but I apologize if any of you experienced some glitchy stuff!

Sure, a small wooden box would do the job, but just in case, shouldn’t we build a more scalable solution? (image from CIA – The World Factbook)

It’s this time of the year again, which is traditionally an occasion to look back at what went down during the year, and set the sights for the year to come. 2009 has been a good year to me professionally. In spite of a gloomy economic context, Clear Lines is still alive and kicking, and revenue has remained stable, without requiring any particular marketing effort. I completed a few consulting projects without any noticeable glitch, managed to find time to release the first official version of Akin – and I am extremely motivated to begin 2010 on the right foot. So many things to do!

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The current version of Akin, my free Excel worksheet comparison application, has been out for a bit now, and people have sent me some interested suggestions on how to make it better. However, my biggest personal issue so far has been speed. Opening large file hasn’t been an issue, but displaying comparisons of large worksheets (say, 200 x 200 cells) was taking a long time. The typical user for Akin is likely to be working with large files (tracking differences wouldn’t be an issue otherwise), so I had to do something about it.

I have bitten the bullet – I changed the design, and completely re-wrote the user interface where the comparison is displayed, and I hope that you will be pleased with the performance improvement. Where a 200 x 200 cells comparison took over 20 seconds to display, a 500 x 500 cells comparison is now virtually instantaneous. While I was at it, I did some cosmetic improvements on the looks as well.

You can download the new version here. Now that this performance problem is out of the way, I can get back to implementing the features that have been suggested so far. Stay tuned!