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Anyone that is a practitioner of testing or specially TDD knows that the quality of your tests are a direct measure in the assumed quality of your tested code. Better put, if your tests suck, you can assume very low quality from your code. So what is harder, writing quality code or writing quality...
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What are you doing to keep your skills current? Do you learn new technologies? Do you learn new tools? Do you learn new languages? If you did not answer yes to at least 1 of the 3 questions above, I have one last question to ask. What are you doing to not become a Dinosaur...
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In the past I have written about the Fail Fast principle. This is a principle I try to live my development life by. I would rather explicitly check for possible failure points then have a runtime error crop up. In the past when writing these failure check we have had to resort to a...
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Today I was looking through the Google Analytics for our site. What really interested me was the stats on the various browsers that are used to view our content. Broswer Visits %Visits Firefox 17,847 47.56% I.E. 17,617 46.95% Opera 1,071 2.85% Safari 583 1.55% Mozilla 287 0.76% I was pleasantly surprised...
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This post is another in the recent string of How-to's. But it is just so hard to resist. .Net 3.5 has so many cool features, it is just fun to explore them all. Ok, so here is the issue we are going to solve today. We have a list of entities and we need to sort them. In this post I will show you...
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Today a friend forwarded me a URL for a software tool that his department just purchases. This URL contained the UserName/Password needed to access the download site of the software company (no, will not say which company). When you click the URL you have COMPLETE access to the access keys...
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How many times as developers have we made list of things we needed to work on. Most of the time they are 'tasks' in some sort of task management system. However, we do not have one of these such systems at work. So I decided to use 'ignored' tests as my tasks. ...
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Test first Test during Test after Answer, Test. No matter what style of testing you believe in, they all share one common trait. They all test your code. So, what is the point of this post you may ask? Simple. To me, it does not matter how your tests come to be, but having tests is what is important...
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A buddy of mine decided to finally give testing a try (not true TDD, but still writing tests) and he made me laugh by some of the statements/observations he made. Where do I start? This feels weird! Am I doing this right? How much is enough? When he mentioned these to me I had to laugh. Why, not because...
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Today I started to play/learn the basics on Linq2SQL and I have to say, it is pretty cool. However, within the first 20 minutes I came to a cross roads, I was stuck. I am torn between the 2 different ways to connect to, and query from, a data source. I don't know which I like better. Below are the...
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Today I came across a nice little list of items that employers can do to keep their employees happy. While reading through this list, two thoughts kept popping into my head that would truly sum up this list. Listen to your employees I know every company says they listen, but that is BS. Most only hear...
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Let me start of by publicly admitting this, I am have OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) when it comes to code. My code must be clean and it must be uniform. And because I am a ReSharper lover my disorder is even more drawn out. Over the past month or so while I have been fixing bugs in our application...
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Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine and he asked if a single developer could be successful following TDD on a team that does not follow TDD. My simple answer was YES, they can. But there are a few things you must consider..... How can they make a difference I am a firm believer that someone...
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In my humble opinion the worst code smell you can have is Dead Code. I know that other smells such as large methods, large classes, overly complex logic, interwoven dependencies, etc are all smells, but nothing, I MEAN NOTHING smells worse than dead code. Let me explain. **** BTW, I am not...
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This post is part 1 of a 2 part mini-series on why I both Love and Hate being a software developer. This is mostly a semi-generic rant about my views on the software industry as a whole, and NOT about any one company that i have worked for. I have been a software developer for the past 8+ years...