Derik Whittaker

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• Removing words like Convince, Convert and Persuade from our vocabulary

  One of the common themes of this years KaizenConf was how to move a towards being a lean organization. During most of the sessions and conversations that I was part I cannot tell you how often I heard words like Convince, Convert and Persuade said. At... Posted Nov 04 2008, 05:26 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Methodology, Opinion, Featured

• Should not be 'The Business', but should be 'Our Business'

  Last night I was listening to a recent HanselMinutes pod casts where he was talking with Tom & Mary Poppendiek .  For those of you who do not know who Tom & Mary are, they are the 2 behind a lot of the lean software movement (books here &... Posted Jul 10 2008, 09:06 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: Opinion, Featured

• Foundations of Programming EBook - Great Read & ITS FREE

  If you have not hear, Karl Seguin has authored a great, short eBook which he is giving away free to the world.  This book is based of his blog series of the same title. Do yourself a favor and go download this book, it is pretty short and is a great... Posted Jul 10 2008, 08:38 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with no comments Filed under: Agile, .Net, Shout-Out, Featured, Announcement

• Developer training, a real (non)success story

  About a year ago I created a few posts on the topic of Developer Ramp time and how companies can help the process as well as why different developers ramp up at different speeds .  Developer ramp time and how companies can aid in speeding up this... Posted Jun 30 2008, 07:42 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 10 comment(s) Filed under: Opinion, Featured

• [ANN] Dimecasts.net is Alive and Kicking

  A few weeks ago while putting together a screencast series on how to use NUnit (and a basic intro to testing) I got the bright idea to launch a new site. I wanted to create a site that allows myself (and others in the future) to create, host and share... Posted May 27 2008, 08:51 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 22 comment(s) Filed under: Featured, DimeCasts.Net

• Thoughts on writing quality test code vs writing quality application code

  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... Posted May 21 2008, 07:31 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: TDD, Opinion, Featured

• Strict Mocking Semantics Is the only way to Mock

  Recently I was giving a Mocking presentation and I made the statement that I prefer strict mocking semantics over loose semantics.  At the end of presentation one of the members of the audience raised point to my liking strict over loose.  We... Posted May 19 2008, 08:27 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 9 comment(s) Filed under: Featured

• XLinq'n in the new world - Data access comparisons with Xml/XPath

  Originally this series was meant to be titled 'Any thing you can do I can do better', but to be honest after writing the Xml/XPath examples I realized the XLinq is really no better per say than Xml/XPath.  However, what XLinq does bring to... Posted May 12 2008, 05:15 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 13 comment(s) Filed under: Featured, Linq, Mini-Series

• Are you going the way of the Dinosaur???

  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... Posted Apr 24 2008, 05:20 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 26 comment(s) Filed under: Opinion, Featured

• ReSharper 4.0, I love you but it may be time we break up

  I have been a loyal and faithful user of ReSharper for the past few years, and am generally happy with the product.  But this 4.0 EAP is starting to kill our relationship.  I know that you are still in 'beta' but come one, what is taking... Posted Apr 22 2008, 09:01 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 46 comment(s) Filed under: Development Tools, Featured

• How to share configuration files between projects

  Sharing configuration files between multiple projects in Visual Studio is a simple task, but it is not intuitive in how it is done.  In fact, until recently I did not know how to do it via the IDE, I would always hand edit the .sln file to enable... Posted Apr 15 2008, 07:47 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 20 comment(s) Filed under: Development Tools, .Net IDE, HowTo, Featured

• Simple extension methods to help with Asserting values

  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... Posted Apr 10 2008, 07:49 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Development, .Net, Opinion, Featured

• Linq and Delayed execution

  If you have not taken a look at Linq (either Linq to objects or Linq to sql) you need to do so.  I would say it is the coolest new feature that was released with .Net 3.5.  But there is one thing that you MUST keep in mind when using Linq. ... Posted Apr 07 2008, 01:11 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .Net, Featured, Linq

• Simple Linq to Object example with Casting

  This is my first go at playing with Linq. So far it is pretty cool, but I wanted to share something because I found it painful. I wanted query a list and then cast a anonymous type to a static type. I was not able to find anything on the net to help me... Posted Feb 22 2008, 09:19 AM by Derik Whittaker with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: HowTo, Featured, Linq

• Things to think about if you want to be a consultant

  I was chatting a buddy recently and he was thinking about making the jump to the consulting world (not solo, through a consulting firm). As he has never been a consultant I gave him my 2cents on questions to ask during the interview as well as things... Posted Jan 02 2008, 03:26 PM by Derik Whittaker with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Opinion, Featured