“What can I do to avoid these ‘magic strings’ in my code?” – This was the question I asked myself recently as I found myself in prepareForSegue comparing segue.segueIdentifier to in-line hard-coded Strings.  This kind of in-line hard-coding of a String for comparison purposes is what I mean by “magi...

The delegation pattern is ubiquitous in iOS development – the pattern is a “core competency” for developing in Cocoa, and if you program with the iOS SDK for any length of time and you’ll end up writing some code that resembles someInstance.delegate = someDelegate. One of the toughest things that I’...

Updated on October 11, 2016 – Swift 3.0 In this writing, I want explore how to use MFMailComposeViewController with Swift to send e-mails within your app as a walkthrough. My focus here is “quick and dirty” pragmatism, so that we can easily see what the inter-working components of MFMailComposeViewC...

In my recent op-ed on clean coding in Swift focused on Type Inference, I began by saying, Quick!  Tell me!  What is the Type of the birdDetails constant in this code example: let birdDetails = birdDetailsFromStorage() With no additional context to glean information from, the correct answer to the qu...

I had a question come to me today regarding sorting an array of integers that are actually encoded as strings in the array.  Data comes to is in a variety of encodings/types, so it’s quite common to need to adjust things to the right state for working with.  Let’s take a look at how to solve this on...

Quick!  Tell me!  What is the Type of the birdDetailsconstant in this code example: 1let birdDetails = birdDetailsFromStorage() With no additional context to glean information from, the correct answer to the question is, “I have absolutely no clue…”  Or is it? “Not fair!”, you say.  “In the real wor...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the principles of clean coding (Bob Martin’s “Clean Code”) apply in Swift. How do I express clean code in this language? Conversely, how do I avoid writing cryptic code in Swift? What language features help me write clear and self-explanatory code and what language...

Updated on December 6, 2016 – Xcode 8 & Swift 3.0 The question has been asked (and solved) on StackOverflow in Objective-C, but my aim in this post is to take the Objective-C implementation and leverage Swift extensions to make this job even easier to achieve and reuse. Fade animations basically inv...

There is a compiler error that throws me off every time I see it.  It takes the form, ‘ClassName?’ does not have a member named ‘memberName' This can happen when you’ve declared a variable as an optional, but forget to unwrap that optional when you attempt to call a method on it. For example, given ...

If you find yourself with broken unit tests, failing to build with the error, “Use of unresolved identifier…”, you’re not alone! Unit Tests and Swift Access Control When Swift access control came into the picture, we suddenly had a little more to consider. From the Apple docs: Swift access control h...

Updated on July 8, 2016 – Xcode 7 My goal with this blog entry is to help get you set up to create NSManagedObject subclasses in Swift for the Entities in your Core Data model. Example Let’s look at a fabricated example: Say that you’ve got a Core Data project and you’re creating Entities.  For my s...

Without 100% support for a mocking framework like OCMock, I found myself needing to get creative when building mock objects and method stubs in Swift unit tests.  The great thing about testing is that you’re…well… testing things out to see if they’ll work, and I found a solution that I’m pretty happ...

I recently hit a road bump when developing a NuGet package. Mid-way through making the package, I decided I wanted to include couple of transforms to add some default connection strings to an app.config or a web.config file.  Try as I may, I couldn’t get NuGet to apply the transforms to my project’s...

I had a major case of “struggleface” when trying to work with the KeychainItemWrapper  for iOS.  I wanted it to be simple – just take a username and password and put it in the iOS Keychain for secure retrieval later.  Turns out that I had to spend an entire work day and do a lot of Googling to get i...

As part of a ASP.Net Web API service that I’m co-developing, I have gotten familiar with the DotNetZip Library.  It’s fantastic.  We’re using it to gather up a set of requested files from network storage, package them in a zip archive, and stream them back to a client via a web application. During t...

Today I was running into a mysterious error in DataStage as I was running a sequence job.  Things seemed to be going well until one of my Fact jobs at the end of the sequence reported “Aborted” in DataStage Director.  Looking into the log for this job revealed a rather vague error message: [StageNam...

“Ooooohh, now… how old is he??”  I love this question.  Really!  I do!  Every time I’m asked I get to talk about my kid, and that’s always fun.  But today, things just got even more fun.  Now, instead of just telling people his approximate age, I can show them his precise age down to the second! As ...

I just spent the majority of my morning trying to figure out why in the world my range lookup kept failing.  Hopefully this will save you some time in troubleshooting your range lookup failures.  To cut right to the chase, my resolution involved sorting my reference source prior to doing the lookup....

Today I’m starting a series related to my journey in learning to develop iOS apps. As lightbulbs come on for me, I plan to write up what I’m learning, if nothing else for my own reference. But I do hope my readers enjoy the discoveries I make along the way. These first few blogs will be somewhat aut...

Today I was working on a bullet chart in Cognos Report Studio.  The chart was rendering, but the target bar would never appear.  Here’s the scenario I was in and how I resolved my issue: My Goal: My goal was to show the average time to process an application against a target processing time for the ...

The steps from IBM’s official documentation, while they attempt to lead you in the direction of changing these properties of a chart, did not register with my brain for about an hour or so of clicking around, frustrated that I could not find the properties they were describing in the articl.  Just i...

When installing Framework Manager 10.1 and attempting to use it for the first time, things went down hill nearly immediately.  I made sure to install a copy of the DB2 client on my development machine, but I still ran into issues connecting to data sources in Framework Manager. For those who need to...

I was recently troubleshooting a seemingly bizarre issue I was having with one of our report subscriptions – the production version was running normally, but our customer suddenly began receiving a very old version of the same report subscription.  After disabling the subscription from all non-produ...

You can visit Part 1 of this troubleshooting series by clicking here. During our configuration of Reporting Services for SharePoint I ran into another common issue. I consulted MSDN once again and followed the directions given at this MSDN article.  Even after following all these instructions, when ...

I recently worked with our SharePoint administrator to install SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode to take advantage of PowerView.  By following the installation instructions found at this MSDN article, we were able to painlessly install both Reporting Services and the R...

Pointer Pointer #1 can be found here – it deals with how the “*” symbol is used in different places when dealing with pointers. A second pointer I have on pointers that helped me is this: A pointer stores an address of where some piece of data “lives” (begins its bit pattern) in memory.  What recent...

Open iTunes. (optional) Import any songs you’d like to make clips for. Select (click) the song that you’d like a sound clip for so that it’s the only one selected. Right-click that song and select “Get Info”. A window will appear – Click “Options” to access the screen to set your start and stop time...

Part of my confusion with the C family of languages has been how the * symbol worked in the various places it’s used in relation to pointers. A key insight helped de-mystify a lot for me: The * symbol is used as both a type declaration and as an operator (the de-reference operator). Example: // * us...

This past week I had the opportunity to attend Microsoft TechEd 2012. Lots and lots of great material presented – I’m pretty stoked about some of the amazing features of SQL Server 2012’s BI stack. During the course of the week I discovered something that has been emerging in my thought process for ...

There is a lot to know. A lot. I happen to be one of those individuals who gets geeked out very, very often over very, very nerdy things. As of late I’ve been really wanting an outlet to share what I’ve learned / am learn_ing._ The world doesn’t need another blog detailing the same things that are a...