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General Programming

Do Developers understand budgets?: Had an interesting conversation with a good PM recently (yes, there are such things as good PMs). There was a project that revolved around upgrading an application from a much earlier version of the .NET framework to a more current one. Even after the upgrade, the overall workflow process includes a number of manual steps in error scenarios that are sub-optimal. A developer on a different team suggested that it was a mistake to allow such manual steps. Surely, proper usage of the capabilities of the .NET framework could eliminate these manual steps. From the outside, this suggestion...; posted @ Sunday, December 11, 2011 8:55 PM | Feedback (2)

Development Train Wreck Days: Mama said there would be days like this: So, it got to the point, I believe after error #7, that I started calling out the numbers for each subsequent error. By the end of the day, I reached 21. Developers talk about “being in the zone” on those days when everything comes together, and you feel ‘hyper-productive’, often accomplishing more in code in a day than you normally would in a week. Train wreck days are like “being in the anti-zone.” And I’m not talking about days when you just don’t get a lot of code written, for whatever reason (too many meetings, confusion about requirements,...; posted @ Thursday, December 08, 2011 7:54 PM | Feedback (0)

Repost: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design: This is a very interesting read. I like this line in particular: “Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?” Take a look.; posted @ Thursday, November 17, 2011 11:53 AM | Feedback (0)

Repost: Relaxed attitude towards the pragmatic delivery of okay software: Rob Ashton has a post up about how he’s addressed his development of a current project. There’s tons to quote here: “…this time I made a real effort to drop any up-front 'zomg my code must be perfect' aspirations from the get go. What does this mean? Well I pretty much decided that technical debt should not be something to be overly avoided, overly organised code-bases stifle creativity and I really just wanted to deliver something.” “A couple of months later how does that leave me? Is the code-base a huge unmaintainable mess? I would say...; posted @ Wednesday, November 02, 2011 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Repost: CQRS is too complicated……not: Rob Ashton has a good post up about how the complaint that CQRS is too complicated isn’t really valid. It’s a good summary.; posted @ Wednesday, September 28, 2011 7:06 PM | Feedback (0)

Review: Tekpub Webcast - Full Throttle : TDD with Brad Wilson: So, after going through the signup process, I finally gained access to this episode. Leading up to this review, I have watched the episode in total 3 times: the first time I watched straight through while taking quick short hand notes, the second time, I watched portions of it in succession, stopping to take more in-depth notes, the third time, I watched it to fine-tune my comments on specific sections. Since I’ve been ragging on Tekpub, it is only fair to start off with a positive general note. Tekpub’s Production Quality Rob has been doing...; posted @ Tuesday, September 20, 2011 8:07 PM | Feedback (0)

Tilting at Windmills Award of the Week: Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture Review announced by OASIS: Holy crap.; posted @ Wednesday, August 24, 2011 1:05 PM | Feedback (0)

Does anyone actually do TDD?: Obviously, the answer is yes. The person who first convinced me that “all that agile stuff” was really the direction to look towards (note, that’s “a direction to look towards”, not “embrace uncritically”, but I digress) practiced it. Or at least, he always had his NUnit test runner up, and I could tell when he was too busy to chat by looking at the status of his tests (when they were all green, I figured he was probably goofing off). I ask the rhetorical question though based on the lead to one of Rob’s posts: “One thing I've...; posted @ Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:06 PM | Feedback (2)

Software Development Troubleshooting Tip #2: When dealing with a large organization: This actually applies to migrations as well. I’ll leave ‘large organization’ vague…let’s make up a number and say if your entire software team (including developers, testers and support personnel) is greater than 20, it qualifies. I’ve seen some organizations do this well, and others…not so much. If you have a critical production issue, you should have two separate call lines, one dedicated to upper management, and the other dedicated to the people actually trying to fix the problem. One person should be available on both lines, all others should be kept separate. The reason for this...; posted @ Wednesday, August 10, 2011 8:14 PM | Feedback (0)

Why isn’t TFS more like <insert alternative here>? Blame Visual Studio: Brian Harry, the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation, has a post about some of the coming improvements to TFS 11. It’s an interesting informational read for many reasons, but includes this: “A little background before I talk about the improvements we are making. When we designed TFS 2005, one of our design goals was to build a system that we could use for developing Visual Studio. VS is a VERY large code base. Last I checked, each branch was around 5 million files and I suspect it’s a good bit larger than that now. Your average developer needs...; posted @ Wednesday, August 03, 2011 7:58 PM | Feedback (0)

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