I haven't mentioned our meetings here in a while but our group has been going strong and enthusiastic all this time. Tomorrow, March 10 th our topic will be build scripts for .Net projects using Rake and Albacore. I've been using Rake and a little bit of Albacore in my own projects and I'm...
I've been doing a lot of static analysis on our projects at work lately. As part of that task we added NCover to our automated build process. Our build runs on Team Build (TFS) and is specified in an MSBuild file. We wanted to take code metrics very seriously and we purchased the complete version...
Later this month I'll be attending the Mozilla Add-Ons Meetup in Chicago. I'm continually impressed with the extensibility of Mozilla applications and the amazing things people are doing with it. I'm interested in both the extensibility model and in writing a few custom extensions myself...
A few years ago I had an interesting discussion with some of my then coworkers about the XML comments in our code. XML comments were useful in some cases because we were writing some libraries to be shared with many of our applications. We kept the DLLs, the XML and the CHM all in the build folder for...
Update: The videos of the presentation and discussion have been posted. This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available...
One thing I realized when working in large companies is that Excel is the true data exchange file format. That what the business types exchange among themselves and how they like to persist any kind of lists or anything that needs to be formatted like a table (be it tabular data or not.) All too often...
Since I started using Visual Studio 2005 and now 2008 it bugs me that strings in the debug windows (Immediate, Watch, Locals, Autos, etc) are automatically escaped in C# syntax (well, at least in C# projects.) Let's assume we are writing some code that produces HTML (or XML, or SQL, or JSON, etc...
In one of the projects I'm working on we produce a number of XHTML documents and we want these documents to be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. As an example of how automation will set you free , I promptly thought that there was no way I would be submitting several dozens of documents to the W3C XHTML validator...