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Monday, February 10, 2003 |
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What is Nunit? Nunit is a .NET Unit Testing Framework that follows in the footsteps of similar tools for Smalltalk and Java. The tutorial is pretty skimpy, but it also appears to be a tool that is easy to use. The official Getting Started document is a bit beefier. I am going to give this tool a go. 4:13:12 PM 
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Radio Tip Of The Day. Radio's glossSub macro allows you to substitute the text phrase of your choice for the text normally associated with a shortcut. For example, earlier today I wrote a story titled Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView. The link was generated using Radio's shortcut facility - the title of the story enclosed in double quotes is automatically resolved and converted into a link using the Story's title as the link text. Radio's shortcut feature does allow you to associate any text phrase you want with the shortcut, but this is a one-time thing; the shortcut text is permanently associated with the shortcut. Sometimes you want to change the link text depending on the context in which it is used to improve the readability of a sentence. That is where the glossSub macro comes in handy.
With the glossSub macro you can still refer to the linked item using a shortcut, but you can override the link text itself. Using the macro is incredibly easy. I used this syntax in a prior post: <%glossSub("Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView", "adventure")%>. The first parameter is the shortcut itself, the second is the link text I want to use. An optional third parameter allows you to specify an anchor tag within a page.
The glossSub macro, shortcuts, and writing in Radio's outliner become an unbeatable authoring combination when you automate creation of story shortcuts. 3:19:10 PM
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Paul's on NIU Radio! My buddy Paul is on the Northern Star's spanking new Radio Broadcast. The Northern Star is the student publication at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb - the town in which I grew up. Listen for Paul's Techno band - Farce. Paul attends NIU. He is also my neighbor next door. and my fishing buddy. Paul says his audience (the roughly 12 people he has told about his music) consist of those "tired of the boring crap on the Radio". Can I quote you Paul? I had no idea I lived next door to such talent. 2:54:52 PM
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Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data. I picked up Dino Esposito's Building Web Solutions With ASP.NET and ADO.NET over the weekend. It paid off almost immediately with a little throwaway example that showed how to bypass SQL calculated expressions by adding expression columns to the Dataset coming out of the query. This is very handy for concatenating string columns (e.g. first and last name or phone number parts) or even performing aggregate functions (like sum or average). Johnny Papa wrote about the same idea in his Data Points column in the January MSDN.
I put this to use in a little ASP.NET application I have been working on which queries an old FoxPro 2.x database. Getting at this data has been an adventure in and of itself so I decided to write something about it. 2:41:29 PM
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My South Barrington Days Are Numbered. Being on an unfunded project was fun for a while, but now I am up against the cold, stark wall of reality. I have to find a project that is willing to foot my salary - preferably a project I will be able to contribute to and something I will enjoy doing. The most difficult part will be resuming my old commute to Northbrook - a 14-mile, stoplight infested, bumper-to-bumper, pothole-laced, rage inducing trek on what veterans refer to as the Palatine Raceway. 1:45:04 PM
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Scraping The Company Intranet Site. I have been playing around with RssDistiller this last week, scraping websites to create feeds. My first attempt went fairly well (although I find the regular expression support in Mark Paschal's Stapler to be a much more powerful scraping mechanism). My second attempt brought me up against my company's intranet site. I thought it would be cool to create a newsfeed from the almost-daily release of announcements posted there. My attempt was brought to a sudden halt, but not through any shortcoming in RssDistiller. My roadblock was caused by the site's administator requiring NTLM authentication. Radio's TCP/IP support was not built with this kind of negotiation in mind. I am toying with the idea of building a Radio script to manage the required handshaking process, but I am not sure if I really want to go there. Another part of me wonders why the site administator is requiring NTLM authentication. This is an intranet site, well-protected within multiple firewalls. That alone restricts access to people jacked into our network (employees, contractors, some approved visitors I suppose). I wonder if this is just an oversight, or something intentional? I think I should call the webmaster. It would help, of course, if they provided some sort of info on who maintains this site. 1:23:26 PM
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