December 2006 Entries

At work, my project is preparing to release the current version of our application to the clients.  This release will is still in version 1.1 of the .NET framework, but we will be converting up to version 2.0 for the next phases of our development.  To accommodate the ongoing support effort of the impending release (we will be supporting this for the next 8 months or so) we have split the source code into two branches.  In theory we will be merging all changes from the support and maintenance branch (.NET 1.1) up to the new development branch (.NET 2.0) on a...

Inspired by this post by Des Traynor, I'm compiling the top posts for the local community in 2006.  Here they are in no specific order. Steven Rockarts on the Decompose Conditional Pattern This is a great post that covers off a nice pattern that will increase the readability of your code.  Take a look at the comments and see what JP Boodhoo suggests as an alternative. Steven Rockarts on Learning Rhino Mocks in Reverse A great little blurb on a different approach to learning how to use a mocking framework. Steven Rockarts on Nant Plus Project Templates...

The more I see of Roy Osherove presenting, the more I like his style.  It's understated, but he doesn't miss covering and emphasizing the important points.  Maybe one day we will get him up here in the City of Champions. This presentation, from TechEd (Europe? this year?), covers a lot of things including CruiseControl.NET, nAnt, nUnit, MSBuild, Team System.  You will need to use either IE or an IE addin for Firefox to view this.  Firefox by itself doesn't work. A couple  of the more insightful statements that Roy mentions are these: During the iterations, the client can not...

I know what all of you are thinking  "Oooohhh, this is going to be good.  I better pick up tomorrows Frostbitten Times to see what carnage appears on the front page."  Sorry to disappoint, but I'm a lover....really.... After seeing a number of different attribute based validation schemes floating around the web, I decided to give one a try.  I came across David Donaldson's post a few days ago and decided to give the open source project EViL (Entity Validation Library) a try. Installation of the product was pretty easy.  Download here and unzip the file.  Add a reference to...

Last night my old buddy (he claims the Leafs have won the cup in his life time....musta been programming on papyrus back then Rob!) Rob Windsor presented to Edmug on An Introduction to WCF.  He did a great job and covered a huge number of topics in the two hours he spent with us.  It was also great to see the audience really get into the topic and ask a bunch of questions. One of the questions that came up was around the concept of programmatically adding and changing WCF MetaData EndPoints.  As always the web is a great place...

I've been looking at a number of different tools and techniques that I can implement at work to help us figure out where this pile of code that our team has inherited is in the most trouble.  One of the techniques that I've used in the past is to implement a cyclomatic complexity evaluation during each build.  There are a few tools out there to do this, but, being a cheap bugger, I have only used the free devMetrics tool.  I went out looking to grab it again this week for us to start implementing and lo-and-behold if the folks...

When you live out here in the hinterland, good software development training is hard to come by.  When it does roll around it's usually not for the technology or tools that you're using.  Times are changing. JP Boodhoo is coming to Edmonton the week of February 19th to 23rd to put on a comprehensive training course on .NET development.  If you've seen JP present you know what you're going to miss by not attending this course.  If you haven't I'll tell you.  You'll miss passionate diatribes about the .NET Framework, Visual Studio and ReSharper.  You'll miss techniques and ideas that...

Don't you hate those days when you think you've seen and heard it all only to find out that there is one more thing that is going to make you want to poke your eyes out?  Well, today I went past poking my eyes out as the only remedy.  Now that I'm thinking about this again, I'm regretting having a scotch at the desk with me.  I'm seriously considering trying to wash away the image burned into my retinas by dousing my eyes with said scotch.  If that doesn't work I might have to carve out my eyes and dig around...