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I finally got around to installing Orcas on my laptop this weekend. You are probably asking yourself, what took so long? Simple, my laptop did not have the spare 14gigs needed in order to get it up and running. It took some pretty major house cleaning in order to get enough spare space. Oh well, on to...
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I am in the process of reading Mary and Tom Poppendieck's latest book ' Implementing Lean Software Development ' and I came across a great quote that is ALL too true in our industry. (I am only 2 chapters in on the book, but so far it is as good as their last book ). 'When testing occurs long after coding...
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Over the years I have come to the conclusion when working with switch statements that switches on enum values, a DEFAULT block MUST be required. Not only should it be required, I think it should throw a developer exception. *** NOTE *** My stance on this is ONLY in scenarios where the switch statement...
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In a previous post I mentioned that my new company is having all their developers get certified. The goal is to have each developer take and pass both 70-536 and 70-526 by the end of the year. What sucks for me is that the week I started the team was reviewing chapter 9. In order to 'catch up' I have...
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In a previous post , I talked about why some developers ramp up faster than others. In this post I would like to explore ways that a company can aid in the ramp up time. In my opinion it is in the best interest of the company to make sure that all of their new employee’s ramp up and become valuable as...
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What does it really cost in terms of time/money to hire in and train a new developer? If you were to ask most in management the answer would be not much. However, if you were to ask most developers, I am sure their answer would be, a LOT. Who is right? Well, as a developer of course I know that developers...
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The other day I was working on hunting down an issue in the application at my new company. It appeared to be pretty straight forward find. It was the standard 'Object not set to instance of an object' message. After getting some guidance as to how to use the system and reproduce the issue, I was off...
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Here is a simple snippet of code that I always forget and have to look up time and time again. This will check to see if a value (string or int) is a match for a enum. This can be useful when trying to load data from a database which is in key the form and you would like to represent that value as an...
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Code reviews are thought to be painful by many, but in my opinion that can be avoided. Code reviews can be a great tool for a project to help keep the code clean and concise. Last time I talked about Code Reviews and how to make them successful , this time I thought I would spell out some of the Rules...
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Recently I needed to grab images via a URL for our project here at work. We basically have a web server the has tons of images for our various products in many different sizes and I wanted to be able to grab the images via a URL. I thought I would throw the code snippets up that are needed to do this...
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Code reviews are something that not all of us like or do, but they can be very valuable. I thought I would express some of my thoughts/opinions about the benefits and pit falls of performing code reviews. Benefits of Code Reviews Performing regular and consistent code can have a great impact on your...
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This post is in response to Sam Gentile's post over at code better I'm Learning Rhino Mocks NHibernate StructureMap Policy Injection Blocks Log4Ne t (yea I know, what took so long. Answer, last few apps use the Logging App Block) MonoRail (about to start playing with that) Castle Windsor if I find time...
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Here's a bit of a cheeky question... You know all those "conversations" us nerds have about scalability and performance where we endlessly debate about where to put business logic and whether scaling the database is easier than scaling the application servers? Well, how come we never end up...
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For a product that I am working on in my spare time I looking for feedback from the community on thoughts/ideas/opinions about the pros and cons of how to store DTO values inside a business entity. Here is the architecture that I am working with: I have business/domain entities that will be used to hold...
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I was making some changes to our app today based on some user feedback. As I started to implement the changes I had conundrum as to what approach to take. Basically, I needed to implement changes to the UI’s behavior in certain situations based on business rules. When needing to suppress UI actions ...