Google’s App Inventor for Android – no programming required?

Creating Android apps with App Inventor: no programming required? Created my first Android app last night using App Inventor–the claim is, “no programming required”, and it seems to live up to that—in a way. Rather than typing programming commands into an editor, per standard programming practice, you snap together pre-defined “blocks” of functionality by dragging and dropping […]

How-to: upgrading BugZilla on Windows Server 2003 and IIS

This is a follow-up post to Installing BugZilla on Windows Server 2003 and IIS, which I posted back in April of 2008. Upgrading BugZilla on Windows: gotchas Recently, having gotten sick of seeing the blurb about new versions of BugZilla every time I logged in, having gotten bored with the somewhat plain-vanilla look, and having […]

MS Test data-driven tests/.CSV file error: Column ‘columnname’ does not belong to table

This is a maddening error, in the best Microsoft tradition of error-text-tells-you-nothing-about-the-real-cause. You are happily running your unit tests using MS Test, and you write a new unit test that requires a series of data to be thrown at the test. An example could be testing the validation code of a property setter. A perfect […]

Hello WordPress!

I have just moved my Blog from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress. Welcome, everyone who followed me on Live Spaces.

VB.Net’s My.Settings and custom objects/classes; Part Two: Getting My.Settings to recognize your custom object

Read Part one OK, so far everything has been pretty simple: adhere to the guidelines for making your class Serializable, and deal with complexities by Implementing ISerializable. So, your next step is to add a Setting, of the type of your custom class, to your application: Right-click your Project name at the top of Solution […]

VB.Net’s My.Settings and custom objects/classes; Part One: requirements for your class

This article is the culmination of many months’ struggle, on and off, with using a somewhat complex object/class I wrote to store user settings into VB.Net’s My.Settings permanent storage provider. The information required to do so is out there, but it’s fragmented and often contradictory, and some articles/forum posts contain inaccuracies; so I set out […]

Website re-design

Just a quick note: The re-design of my website is live at: http://www.cushen.com! Currently listening to: The Replacements – "Johnny’s Gonna Die"

Fixing Strong Name password Errors

Strong name key file password "incorrect"; "specified network password is not correct" This has happened to me twice in the last six months, and I keep forgetting the incredibly simple fix, so I’m posting it here, both for my own use, and in the hope that I can help someone else. Here’s the scenario: you […]

How-to: Setting up Mono on Mac OS X, Part Three

Part 3 of a series; see Part Two here Continued from Part Two The actual problem, and its solution After spending way too much time on a wild goose chase, it finally occurred to me to do what I should have done in the first place: hit the Mono website harder for a solution. I […]

How-to: Setting up Mono on Mac OS X, Part Two

Part 2 of a series; see Part One here Continued from Part One: At this point, follow the same process to install the CSDK, starting with the .dmg file, which is named in the same pattern. In my case, it was named: monoframework-csdk-2.6.1_1.macos10.novell.ppc.dmg. double-click it, double-click the resulting  drive icon, double-click the .pkg file…you know […]