A recent confrontational thread within the Subtext forums that I shared with Rob Conery got us into a discussion about the challenges of dealing with difficult members of an Open Source community. There are many approaches one can take. Some advocate not engaging disruptive co...

Specifications are for the weak and timid! This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code! You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent wh...

Patrick Cauldwell points out that the challenge of coding a business app isn’t in writing the code, that’s easy. The challenge is in understanding business requirements, and not because developers and architects can’t understand plain English. In my experience, I find that oft...

A while ago, Jeff Atwood wrote about the merits of laziness for successful software developers. Lest this become the mantra of sub-performing developers everywhere, I wanted to follow up with a clarification. It’s fine to be lazy as he describes in the article, just don’t be i...

One common objection I hear to TDD and writing unit tests is that it creates a lot of extra work to develop software. And this is true, but it does not give a complete picture. TDD and writing and maintaining unit tests do take discipline and do increase the time (thus cost) o...

While we’re on the topic of appropriate analogies for software development, my homie Micah writes a post about how certain analogies fall short, and he compares writing software to being an artist. He has some great insights into the idea that there is no such thing as “mainte...

Disclaimer As is customary when a non-lawyer attempts to discuss the finer points of the law, I must start with a disclaimer. I know some fine lawyers, but I, sir, am not a lawyer. So please do not consider this to be legal advice. It is merely a rough primer on copyright law...

As a kid, one of my favorite tools I had was a shiny red cased Victorinox swiss army knife. I’d carry that sucker around with me everywhere, using the main blade to tackle nearly every problem like a caveman with a stick. Until one day I sliced my finger trying to stick a pape...

Intro I have a bit of “me” time today to write some code and I thought I’d treat myself to something light and fun by building something purely for its flashiness and aesthetic. Something that does’t have any useful purpose other than it looks good. I am a big fan of adding ef...

A religious war is a very passionate conflict or argument in which each side is absolutely convinced of the objective truth of his own position on a matter of personal preference.

The local newspaper sports a comic strip that enjoys every opportunity to mock the modern university’s emphasis on diversity. The strip holds diversity accountable for lowered standards and educational quality. However it ignores the danger of a lack of diversity, namely that...

I don’t know about you, but when I find something wordy but really worth reading on the web, I print it out. Sure, I could try reading it on my tablet, but do you really want to deal with your tablet while reading in the...er... “office” if you know what I mean? *wink wink* *n...

So you are coding along riding that TDD high when you reach the point at which your code needs to send an email. What do you do now? You might consider writing something that looks like: EmailMessage email = new EmailMessage();email.FromAddress = new EmailAddress(from);email.A...

We often hear that the current state of software development is still dysfunctional. Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a book to that effect called Dreaming In Code. He takes takes a look at the question Why is software so hard? According to Scott, Software developement’s history...

Jeff Atwood writes a great post on how to become a better programmer by not programming. For the most part, I totally agree with his premise that to become a better programmer, you need to... Learn about your users. Learn about the industry. Learn about your business. Understa...

In Jeff Atwood’s infamous FizzBuzz post, he quotes Dan Kegel who mentions. Less trivially, I’ve interviewed many candidates who can’t use recursion to solve a real problem. A programmer who doesn’t know how to use recursion isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, assuming the prog...

You’ve spent hours setting up your blog on your favorite blog platform just right. Good for you! So how do you maintain your blog so that it remains at the top of its game?

When searching for source code in a particular language, what do the words being searched on tell you about that language? Koders.com publishes an interesting Open Source Zeitgeist which focuses on search trends and patterns within open source code. This is very similar to Goo...

Jeff Atwood writes a great summary of Open Source Licenses. As far as I’m concerned, there’s really only four software licenses to worry about (open source or otherwise). Proprietary - The code is mine! You can’t look at it. You can’t reverse engineer it. Mine Mine Mine! GPL -...

Hardest part of coding is not writing code, but reading it.

Before I begin, I should clarify what I mean by using a database as an API integration point. In another life in a distant galaxy far far away, I worked on a project in which we needed to integrate a partner’s system with our system. The method of integration required that whe...

At the end of an average eight-hour workday, the fingers have walked 16 miles over the keys and have expended energy equal to the lifting of 1 1/4 tons.

In a recent post, I compared the expressiveness of the Ruby style of writing code to the current C# style of writing code. I then went on and demonstrated one approach to achieving something close to Ruby’s expressiveness using Extension Methods in C# 3.0. The discussion focus...

I don’t know about you, but every company I’ve ever worked at had a Fort Knox like system in place for deploying code to the production server. Typically, deployment looks something like this (some with more steps, some with less): Grab the labeled (tagged) code from the versi...

Been a short break from blogging, but I’m ready to get back to writing about Cody, I mean code! My philosophy towards Open Source Software is that the more sharing that goes on between projects, the better off for everyone. As my friend Micah likes to say, A rising tide lifts...

System.IO.Path How often do you see code like this to create a file path? public string GetFullPath(string fileName){ string folder = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings ; return folder + fileName;} Code like this drives me crazy because it is so prone to error. For example, when...

Most of the time when I’m testing my code, I only test it using the en-US culture since, ...well..., I speak English and I live in the U.S. Isn’t the U.S. the only country that matters anyway? ;) Fortunately, there are Subtext team members living in other countries ready to sm...

Testing code written for the web is challenging. Especially code that makes use of the ASP.NET intrinsic objects such as the HttpRequest object. My goal is to make testing such code easier. A while ago, I wrote some code to simulate the HttpContext in order to make writing suc...

In the The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks highlights an eye opening disparity in productivity between good and poor programmers (emphasis mine). Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measu...

Have you ever wanted to take a look at the internals of the .NET Framework? Sure you can (and should) fire up Reflector and see the Base Class Libraries, but what about the fully commented source code? What about the parts implemented in C++? A while back, Microsoft released t...