My code stories

The ways that I work have changed in several areas over the last two years. Not only am I working with more complex systems, but I need to share what I do with a lot of people as well, and in order to collaborate we need to keep the state of our work in sync.   In short - what’s needed for this to work is a content management system. While there is nothing special about that, the system that I'm getting to know is better and more available than most of the other systems out there.   I am talking about Git. Now some might arrest me for calling it a CMS, so I'll quickly correct myself by stating that it is a revision control system. Regardless of that I thought it was a pain at first when I started using it. The fact that it mainly was designed with Linux in mind didn't exactly help a Windows guy as I am, but I've actually found quite a few quirks that make my work a lot easier. These I will come back to in later posts. For now I'll stick to describing the conce...

Hi there! Just including a link to the Qt Labs blog . Designing documentation is not that different from designing applications and arm chairs. It all about usability and style:) Have a look: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/09/28/giving-the-doc-a-facelift/ So until next time, happy designing/coding! :)

This part of the series will handle the creative part of the cycle. You might loosely categorize the steps of the design process in three different stages. First is the creative methods - this stage contains methods that drives the design project forward adding new ideas and features to the design. However, systemizing the ideas and filtering them is also part of this stage. The next stage contains different methods of implementation. This is where the ideas meet the matter - where ideas become code and components. You get the idea:) The third and last stage is perhaps the most crucial one. This is where you test and evaluate your results. It is now that you have to decide whether the implementations meet with the requirements and visions of the design. The outcome of this stage will determent if the prototype is ready for some real world testing, also called a beta. Anyways, after clearing that up, the creative stage is what this part of the series will be all about. The Creati...

The title for this blog entry might not be of the most creative kind but in this new blog series, I'm going to do my best on being creative. For a long time now, I have wanted to do a blog post series on design and programming. I love working in creatively and try to come up with new, or at least different, ways of solving problems. I have done work involving web technology, application programming and design on different occasions, and I was thinking; why not combine them? So that is precisely what I will do. I want to design some kind of web tool and include the entire design cycle in the series. This does not mean that I will include the complete academic process, so don’t kill me if I skip a step or two. :) In this post, I'll go through the process of designing an application. Not the whole process of course, but the cycle of events that drives a design process. The next posts in the series will handle each step on the way to creating the application. Nevertheless, f...

In my last entry I showed you some ways to get data from the user in different ways. We are now going to use this data to ready the environment for Qt programming. To be able to build with Qt, or any other programming library, Windows needs to know the whereabouts of all libraries and tools that will be used. This is included in the environment variables. To list all the environment settings in PS type: Get-ChildItem env: In the section below I will include the complete script and comment the code inside the script. When you comment your code in PS you prefix the lines with #. This will cause PS to ignore this line while running. Also note that I am organizing my code in three functions. One to clean the environment, one to set the environment and one main function that calls the other classes. # We fetch the input $firstArg = $args[0] # Clean any QTDIR from the path function cleanPath(){ # We use the net function split() to split the Windows # path into an array using the ; cha...

It has been a few weeks since the last blogpost on PS now, so it is indeed time for a new one. I'm getting hang of this PS scripting environment and I think it's time again to share some knowledge. This time around I will dig more into how to create scripts and especially how we pass data to the script in different ways. Scripts are useful because they are both simple and complicated at the same time. Simple in the sense that they are easy to create, and simple to use. Complicated because they can do advanced sets of tasks so that you don't have to do them over and over again. One task that I need to do is to set a working environment for programming in Windows. I need to configure paths and other environment variables. I also need to create simple projects and want them to be organized in a special way. I want to do this simple and quickly without passing a whole heap of lines to my shell. This means that I need to build myself a tool that can execute commands, copy and o...

Here is another small blog entry on how to use PowerShell. When you download and install this tool you want to get to work right away. However, there are a few small obstacles to sort out. There are a few reasons why Microsoft is focusing on security but I will not move further in on that discussion here. Let's just say that they do and that PS is no exception. The default setting for this scripting environment is ironically enough that you cannot run your own scripts on it:) In order to do this you have to change this you need to set the ExecutionPolicy. It is set to "Restricted" by default. This policy can have four different values. "Restricted" will not load configuration tools or run any scripts. "AllSigned" will only run scripts and configuration files that have been signed by a trusted publisher. This also includes your own scripts. "RemoteSigned" is the one you would want to use if you only want to run your own scripts. It will st...