Randoom a Michael Friis production

Downloading the EU

… or parts of it anyway.
The European Union is generally up to lots of weird and wonderful things, one of the more esoteric being the “Tenders Electronic Daily” (TED) database. Basically, all public procurement above a certain value has to go through this database so that companies from all over the world have a fair [...]

Smuggling exceptions out of try-catches with IEnumerable

The code in this post is from a talk by Erik Meijer, I claim no credit.
Take a look at this screenshot:

Pretty wacky huh? Visual Studio has broken into debug mode even though the division is clearly wrapped in a try-catch. Take a guess at what’s going on before reading on.
Here’s the full code listing:
static void [...]

CRMMetal and LINQtoCRM

As you may know, Microsoft introduced many-to-many relationships in version 4.0 of Dynamics CRM. Unfortunately, querying these relationships is not supported through the general web service entities as the intermediary entities are not exposed. Fetch XML works fine however (and don’t forget this great hack to generate FetchXML). The missing entities meant that LINQtoCRM didn’t [...]

Showing maps and borders in Processing

A few days ago, I posted a video showing public procurement expanding geopraphically with the EU enlargements in the ’00s. There weren’t any borders, but you could sort of see the outline of Europe and how the dots spread east with time.
Adding actual borders to the map proved very frustrating. The Geographical Information System (GIS) [...]

Processing and SQL server on Windows

Tim Regan has a comprehensive description of how he got SQL Server 2008 running with processing. I found some steps to be superfluous while others were missing (it was still an invaluable guide though), here’s how I did it:

Get the SQL Server JDBC driver, be sure to get the Windows version
Unpack it somewhere and copy [...]

Video of procuring authorities in the EU

I did a video showing the geographical spread over time of authorities buying stuff through the EU public procurement system. We managed to hijack all the contracts some time ago and the addresses of the authorities and the winning contractors have now all been geocoded. You can also explore the data on the TEDBot website.
The [...]