July 2007 Entries

About 8 months ago I ran my work application through nDepend to see what kind of disaster we really had on our hands.  The results provided a very deep insight into the current state of our application and certainly reaffirmed the thoughts on refactoring that we had been having.  After a few months of steady refactoring, mixed with a switch from .NET 1.1 to 2.0, I again ran the solution through nDepend to see if it would confirm my belief that we had actually made a difference.  To my relief, there was a noticeable difference in the results (luckily for me they...

I'm sitting here watching the Argentine and Mexican U20 teams play in the Quarter Finals of the U20 World Cup and I'm noticing the language of the announcer more than I normally would during a sporting telecast.  What I'm taking notice of is the richness of the language used to describe the game as it is being played.  Where the announcers in North America struggle to state more than the obvious and statistics while the game is being played, this British gent (I'll try to catch his name as the second half starts -- Nigel (last name neglected)) is almost...

I've spent some time working with and presenting on extension methods.  In this screencast I create three different extensions.  One to check if a string is null or empty, a second to release my presentation code from the shackles of System.Console.WriteLine(), and a third that shows how to create your own iterator inside of an extension method. You can download the file here.  You will also need the Camtasia codec which can be downloaded from here.  As always, I welcome feedback on my style and content.

We've all heard the tales of projects that enter the throws of despair as they near their "conclusion".  I'm sure we all shudder at the thought of this, shake our heads and say "I hope I'm never on a project like that".  I know I did.  Now I am. For those of you that haven't heard the term before, Wikipedia has a fantastic definition of it here.  The current state of project affairs for me includes all of the desperate attempts to revive it, including long hours (weekends haven't been ruled out) and more resources (because Brooks' Law doesn't apply in the reality-free-zone this...

During my presentation at Edmug on some of the new language features in .NET 3.5, I had some great questions and scenarios thrown at me.  As a follow up to those questions I've recorded a second screencast to show the scenarios discussed.  You can download the follow up here. A comment about the size of the last screencast got me playing around in Camtasia to see if I could create a more compact result.  Hopefully this one (about 10% of the previous one's size) is easier for you to get at.