Welcome to Software Wisdom, my place for divulging knowledge on software development and programming knowledge both old and new.

I’ve been wanting to write out knowledge about technologies and software development that I am familiar with for a number of years. From the most mundane and basic how-to all the way to super-advanced skills. Without actually committing to writing a full book, I wanted to be able to pick and choose what I talked about, even the most basic tutorials, if written clearly and succinctly, on doing something as mundane as sorting an array of numbers, will be useful to someone just starting out.

There are many resources on the internet dealing with every conceivable software development technology and programming language you can think of, but who says there should only be a single source of information? If you subscribe to that philosophy there would only ever be one book on C# programming, one book on PHP programming, one book on graphics programming, and so forth, which is patently absurd. I have found, over the many years I have been developing software and programming computers, that a great way to learn something is to study the techniques of other more knowledgeable practitioners, but even better is to study the techniques of many practitioners. There are so many ways, both simple and clever, to solve a particular problem, and possibly even more so in software development than in any other discipline, that studying several solutions to a single problem teaches you so much about the sub-problems that compose and make-up the bigger problem.

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This morning I was fiddling around with the Atlassian BitBucket REST API so that I could display my list of Open Source projects on my website (you can find them in the sidebar) and it was driving me completely nuts. The unhelpful “Resource not found” (404) error message kept coming back even though it looked… Hankering to read the remainder of “BitBucket REST API is completely case-sensitive?” Click on this link!

I’ve got Kiln, Mercurial, TortoiseSVN, SlikSVN, Git and TortoiseHg all installed on my Windows 7 workstation and they all hate each other and won’t play nice at times. A couple of weeks ago I updated Mercurial, didn’t give it much thought but started noticing two glaring error messages in my console window: *** failed to… Click here to continue reading the remainder of the post

Need a quick and dirty way to see what results WordPress XMLRPC calls are returning from the server? Try curl, the Swiss army knife of command-line network tools. The CURL Command For Windows: curl -d “<?xml version=\”1.0\”?> <methodCall> <methodName>wp.getUsersBlogs</methodName> <params> <param> <value>username</value> </param> <param> <value>password</value> </param> </params> </methodCall>” http://otakunozoku.com/xmlrpc.php For Linux: curl -d ‘<?xml version=”1.0″?>… Continue reading the remainder of this article

Need to convert a string in to an int in C#? That sort of task is trivial thanks to the TryParse method of the System.Int32 structure which is a standard part of the .NET Framework. TryParse does exactly what you need by taking a properly formatted string and converting it to an integer. The great… Needing to get the rest of “C# How To Convert String To Integer Value?” Click this!

Got a folder full of images that need to be converted from one format to another? Use Image Magick and do in a few seconds what it could take hours in Photoshop or other image editing applications to achieve. One of the simplest ways to convert a directory full of images from one format to… Thirsting to read the rest of “How To Batch Convert Images With Image Magick?” Click this!

.NET offers the programmer many strongly typed data types. One of those is the System.Boolean structure which represents a Boolean value. System.Boolean, though programmers normally use the bool alias when declaring Boolean variables, have a value of either true or false. These two logical values permit the Boolean data type to represent anything that needs… Yearning to get the remainder of “C# What Is The System.Boolean Structure?” Click the link!

.NET and C# provides the programmer with the bool (Boolean) data type to represent values that are true or false. Any need to represent a two-state mechanism, such as a light switch, can be represented by a bool, e.g. on or off, yes or no, and so on. C# bool Type Definition The intrinsic data… Yearning to read the rest of “C# What Is The Bool Data Type?” Click this!

With the introduction of the CSS3 border-radius style tags, web developers can now easily create rounded corner design elements that previously required a lot of intensive fiddling with itty-bitty graphics and multiple div tags. Judging by the number of websites out there that use rounded corners in a lot of their design elements (including this… Click to continue reading the remainder of this post

The ability to set a different colour on each edge of the border around an element is coming. No more slicing up GIFs or PNGs , no more layering of DIV sections! Setting border edge colours in CSS3 is still not widely supported (as of this writing only Firefox supports it) but by the next… Thirsting to read the rest of “CSS3 Coloured Borders?” Click here!

How do you create coloured borders with CSS3? With the new border-color tags of course! The border-color tag permits a web designer to be very specific about the colours used in the border of an HTML element. As the W3C inches their way towards delivering on the promise of CSS3, many more browsers are beginning… Continue reading the remainder of “Creating Coloured Borders With CSS3.”