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On March 31, 1998, around 10am, my then-manager Alex and I left the office we shared together and headed over to Electronics Boutique. Alex and I were both developers working for the IT department of an up and coming software company called PC DOCS. In those days, we didn’t have a corporate firewall...
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Ayende recently posted a an article titled “Where is the bug” . While reading the comments, I was disappointed by some of the answers to Ayende’s request to find the bug. Here are two of the comments that stood out to me: “You could argue the biggest bug is the use of a switch statement as it violates...
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This past Saturday I had an early morning coffee with a friend. He’s an entrepreneurial type – a big thinker who moves at a fast pace and is always thinking ahead. One question he asked of me, “Are you playing checkers or chess?”. The question was asked around business and career but I could not...
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Many months ago I wrote a letter to upper management about principles of software development and the ways in which should build software. Since that time my role has changed within the company and for the first time in my career I’m managing a significant number of people (at a previous company...
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One of my biggest professional hindrances is a lack of confidence. I don’t have a CS degree. In fact, I have almost zero technical academic training. (My degree is in Religious Studies). In addition, I hang out with a lot of very smart and motivated programming gurus. I tend to judge myself by what they...
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I felt compelled to write after seeing this very same issue come up twice in the last week or so, once for a fellow developer and today for me. The Problem We use a DataSet for assistance with testing our data layer (think NDBUnit ). The problem we have is that when you generate the DataSet the...
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I just listened to Scott Hanselman interviewing Dave Laribee regarding ALT.NET . I really like what Dave had to say, and I encourage everyone to go and listen. I've been reticent about the ALT.NET movement (aside from my initial surge of enthusiasm.) I'm a bit shy when it comes to controversy...
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Last week or so, I stumbled on to the site for the Visual Studio 2008 Demo Challenge . The gist of the contest is to make a video explaining why VS 2008 is great, and then win stuff. Your video is played backed in a Silverlight app that your host at silverlight.live.com. So I make a video, and I think...
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Jeremy Miller recently posted a general encouragement to blog. I'll add my voice to his and as well as confess that I have avoided posting sometimes out of fear of being stupid. The truth is, I am stupid. But blogging helps me unstupid, so I'm deliberately posting more. Francis Bacon said: R...
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Despite the fact that I got off to a miserable start (walking along the Charles, rain soaked and a bit lost) today was a blast. I got to hear Rockford Lhotka (of CSLA fame) along with Anthony Handley describe their recent experiences with WPF. This was cool because they've been working on the same...
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I want to link to Scott Bellware's post on attitudes regarding classic ASP. He makes an excellent point, and I agree with him. About four years ago, I remember telling my former employer about the epic superiority of ASP.NET over classic ASP. I could not deride classic ASP enough. Boy, was I a jerk...
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We were recently contracted to assist a development team in employing some Best Practices . Specifically, they were interested in learning Agile. We began by speaking with the developers and managers to try to determine what would benefit them the most. We were only given three weeks to teach/guide/coach...