tips&tricks

Keeping your dependencies up to date is not the funniest part of a project dev process. Especially if the dependencies list becomes long. However, it is crucial to keep your dependencies as possible close to the up-to-date versions available in order to benefit from the latest upgrades (such as bug fixes). The longer you wait, the harder the upgrade will be. So what if you receive an email every week to inform your team about the last version available of your projects dependencies? Some tools like Lint…

There is one major flaw you must have encountered whilst working with Silverlight for a while: its incompatibility with unit tests! Unless you’ve been using Silverlight solely for drawing circles and rectangles, surely you must have tried to use the Silverlight Toolkit unit test project template to try to put some TDD in your project ! ...most probably you were disappointed by it because it’s fairly poor...

After working more than a year on different projects using PowerShell (v1 and v2), I would like to share with you some Best practices that I could identify. I decided to write this article when I realized that I was always using the same tips/tricks and asking people working with PowerShell to use them as well. Some of the tips that I’ll give may seem stupid and/or quite common (not to say mandatory), in the development world... But scripting is not really part of the…

Last time we have seen how to rescue your FAT. In this article we'll see a third, and last, way of losing data. Physically crash a hard disk Hard disk are made of mechanical pieces, so they are subject to ageing. The S.M.A.R.T. technology, shipped in hard disk for years, can monitor a bunch of indicators helping you foresee your hard disk's end of life. Under GNU/Linux, smartd is widely used. As all the indicators, if they are not seen by a human, they are…

Last time, we have seen how to rescue a partition. Let's go further and make an other mistake... Crash your partition's FAT The FAT (file allocation table) is a map : it tells the OS where all the files of your partition are. Thus, there is one FAT by partition, and the FAT is depending of the filesystem of your partition. It's the same analogy as the partition table : if you loose this map, the cities are still there but you don't know where.…

I could show you the recipe on how to rescue your data and disks, but as it mainly depends on the way they are erased / crashed, I will show you in which particular case the rescue I expose can be made. Thus, in those 3 articles I'll expose you three different ways of crashing data and disks, and the ways to rescue them. It serves another purpose : to show you how easy it is to lose data and disk. I've tested for you…