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Dru and I were recently featured on Herding Code Podcast. In the podcast we talk about everything from package management in general to Nubular (Nu) to other package management systems ( OpenWrap , Bricks , and Horn , although horn was/is slightly different) to the possibility of Microsoft releasing...
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Today I was trying to wrap some code in some tests (I got lazy and did not create the tests first… shot me). What I was trying to ensure was that my event handlers I passed into a method were actually being wired up for usage. Now I searched around the net for a while to see if there was...
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I was recently pointed to an InfoQ article titled Do Story Points Relate to Complexity or Time? It mentions that some teams estimate by a matter of complexity versus how long in effort something will take. Mike Cohn , who wrote the original post It’s Effort, Not Complexity , makes some very good points...
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I came across a great video link yesterday, entitled “ Performance, Feedback, Revision ”. It’s a Canadian rapper named Baba Brinkman covering the theory of evolution and the work of Charles Darwin, and he equates evolution with how he writes his lyrics, Performance, Feedback, Revision. As I listened...
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As a general rule all software development teams will create technical debt during the construction of their product. Creating this debt is in no way an indicator that the team is bad or not talented, but rather is an indicator that they understand that there are always tradeoffs when building...
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This past Saturday I had an early morning coffee with a friend. He’s an entrepreneurial type – a big thinker who moves at a fast pace and is always thinking ahead. One question he asked of me, “Are you playing checkers or chess?”. The question was asked around business and career but I could not...
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I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . As the title suggests, it deals with certain fundamental differences in the way we see the world and how that affects our political views. Don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into politics in the...
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This past week I was taking a look at one of our build scripts as it appeared to be taking a bit longer than everyone wanted. Because I am very close to the file (authored about 50% of it) I decided that in place of just diving in and looking at the raw source I would instead run the script with the...
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If your application needs extension points what do you do? Building a plugin based system is not cutting edge, it is not rocket science. However, it does take a little effort and can be a bit painful depending on your implementation. The guys at MS (Glen Block and crew) has been working on...
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FuncWorks, LLC ’s first XNA game, IncaBlocks , is now available on Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG)! This game represents the many hours and weekends Dylan , Cicelie and myself worked the past several months. Looking back at SVN, I started this as a side project to ROCS around July 30th. Shortly thereafter...
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I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
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The blogosphere has gone a bit crazy the last few days with posts responding to Joel Spolsky’s latest article about "The Duct Tape Programmer" . Bloggers everywhere are tossing their two cents in and saying what parts of Joel's post was good and what wasn't good. Once noticeable trend...
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Joel , in his inimitable way, posted the flame bait of all flame bait posts yesterday , explaining the role of the Duct Tape Programmer. To my surprise, the Twitterverse started to reverberate with commentary, but weirdly, almost all of it was very negative about the post, many claiming that Joel was...
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Things I’ve said in a session before: “Friends don’t let friends ORM” “ORM is a pattern, not a framework” “I like typed datasets, and I cannot lie” It’s not that I’m anti-ORM, or believe popular ones like NHibernate, Linq2Sql, and EF are useless...
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If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...