These tools rock! I can't believe they are free.

I am really looking forward to this. CI is a big miss in the current release of the TFS platform. It's good to know that it is being resolved. I am anxiously awaiting and I am pretty sure I am not alone.

I've been digging into MSBuild and its integration with CruiseControl.NET over the past week and have found some good references on the web. The MSDN documentation being the best I've found so far. I haven't found any "Best Practices" per se so am taking the liberty to start some of what I think make sense to me. Here are five tips to help get you started, however, I would definitely recommend taking a look at these links as well as the MSDN documentation.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Mike Albainy of Apollo Data Technologies last Friday. It was good to catch up and discuss a common passion -- the intersection of data mining technology with the vast and growing amount of data through the healthcare industry.

The other day when discussing some of the challenges we were facing with Lysine with a co-worker, I was forced to stop and think when he made the statement, "Don't be afraid of throwing everything away if you think another direction is better.".

For the past several days at work, we've begun a Scrum on a new project. At first, I was not thrilled with the idea of a daily "status" meeting. However, the 15 minute Scrum meeting every morning is unlike your typical management run status meeting. It's far more efficient.

I know wordy title. Big deal. It describes what I want to discuss.

I have been writing Hex quite a bit in the context of constructing unit tests for Lysine. I first was simply creating static byte arrays in the unit tests themselves, however, it started becoming a bit unwieldy as well as providing less than favorable reuse of that test data.

The other day, I discovered the Generic collection, BindingList, in the System.ComponentModel namespace after reading about it in Rocky Lhotka's recently revised and updated Expert C# Business Objects.

The center piece of our solution is a Type that derives from System.IO.Stream. The EbcdicStream takes as it's input a custom data structure that has been built to model the definition found in a copy book, as well as a source stream. This source stream will typically be a FileStream that points to the raw EBCDIC file that you wish to process into delimited ASCII.