One thing you might notice as you go through the agile process… you can do standup, you can move cards around on a corkboard, you can estimate, do time boxed iterations, milestones… but the User Story is the key to it all. If you don’t break your software project up in to digestible, well formed pieces, … Continue reading
Author Archives: Kyle Hodgson
Dealing with Ugly Web Services
If you’ve reviewed the API’s of different payment processors, you’ve seen that they’re fairly standard, but with lots of little differences. All in all, they’re well formed, easy enough to work with – but some of them are a little dated in their approach. Sometimes, you have to deal with one web service for processing … Continue reading
On Microsoft, HTML5, and Silverlight
I don’ t want to get in to the big picture “Adobe vs. HTML5 vs. Silverlight” discussion, I think its been done well elsewhere. However, if Mary Jo is right in her recent article about Microsoft’s intentions, I’m a little worried: “Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some … Continue reading
Is Wal-Mart right?
Having launched programs on all sorts of payment networks, including Canada’s home grown Interac “PIN debit” system, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and even Maestro in Europe, I can relate to both sides. It’s true, right now as EMV is not common place in the US yet, the cards are a bit more expensive, as are the … Continue reading
Browser Poll
Over on LinkedIn, I’m doing a quick poll of who uses what Browser. Right now, with 12 responses, its evenly split between two browsers. However, you might not guess which two! Check it out, and put your own vote in. Continue reading
Windows Phone 7
I checked out the Windows Phone 7 tools tonight, and I’m very happy with the current release. Visual Studio Express is one fantastic product, and Silverlight 4 is very nice. In about an hour (or two) I had a basic app going. Hit F5, and up it comes in an emulator. I’m toying around with … Continue reading
Visa launches virtual debit card program in Japan
FinExtra reported late last week that Visa is launching a virtual debit card program in Japan. What is this exactly? It’s a credit card number, and all of the requisite security features to perform a transaction, but no plastic card. We’ve also seen this approach in programs like TPG Rewards’ “e-Movie Cash™” product. These products … Continue reading
Sometimes it is the easy things…
When adding a new reference to a well known payment gateway’s web services WSDL URL, I was confused tonight when I kept getting the following error over and over: Could not find endpoint element with name “PaymentGateway” and contract “PaymentGateway.ContractName” in the ServiceModel client configuration section. This might be because no configuration file was found … Continue reading
Great site on SQL!
This guy should be required reading for anyone coding against an RDBMS. http://www.sommarskog.se Continue reading
nServiceBus
So, now that I have a firm grasp of what’s good and bad about WCF -> MSMQ, I’m going to take the evening out to review nServciceBus. It’s website isn’t down, and I have a pot of tea and a stack of old CD’s, so lets see how much I can figure out. The inherent pub/sub async … Continue reading
Kyle Hodgson 