Group items tagged

"If you're afraid to look at your To-Do list, it's not working.  Your To-Do list should inspire you. One of the things that happens a lot with To-Do lists is they can get overwhelming.  It's easy to pile on more things.  Eventually, you're afraid to even look at your To-Do list.   What once started out as a great list of things to make happen, has now became a laundry list of things that hurts more than it helps."

"Dependencies are nearly unavoidable for non-trivial software projects. These can be large dependencies, such as web frameworks and databases, or smaller decisions, such as pagination helpers or simple math libraries. The inevitable inclusion of these dependencies, however, is not an excuse to shape the solutions of your system around what you do not own. Instead, there ought to be an emphasis on finding the right fit and then owning the way dependencies interface with your system."

"the most important guideline is to watch for warning signs in your own code-- so called "code smells". Developing your "code nose" is something that happens early in your programming career, if it's going to happen at all. I combined all the documented code smells I could find into this reference; most of these smells should be familiar to you."

Using peer code review best practices  optimizes your code reviews, improves your  code and makes the most of your  developers' time. The recommended best  practices contained within for efficient,  lightweight peer code review have been  proven to be effective via extensive field  experience.

"LinkedIn has just passed 175 million registered users and is widely recognized to be the most successful business-oriented social media networking site in the world. So why haven't more people - especially IT pros -  figured out how to maximize its features and make it a tool that effectively builds relationships with their peers and attracts appropriate employment options?"

Visual Studio 2012 gets rid of "VS Setup" projects. However, the WiX toolset provides a strong open alternative for creating your installation packages. This PowerShell script (vdproj2wix.ps1) is a very simple one for converting a Visual Studio setup project (aka a .vdproj file) into a WiX format one (i.e. a .wxs file).

"When an application is loading, users will typically see a progress bar on their screen that gives them a visual indication of when the application will finish loading. The way your progress bar moves and animates affects how users perceive the load time of your application"

"Visual Studio 2012 has a great new Test Explorer.  The Test Explorer is where you see the results of your unit tests.  In Update 1 it has been extended, and you can now organize and filter the test runs based on several conditions, among them your Projects, and Traits."

"I've done a number of talks on Productivity in the past. Lots of folks ask me what my tips are for being productive. I've taken all those tips as well as tips from Kathy Sierra, Stephen Covey, David Allen, The Pomodoro Technique and many more and aggregated them into a system that works well for me. I talk about how to effectively handle large amounts email, sorting your personal data stream, how to conserve your keystrokes, the "one email rule" that you need to be effective"

"Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions."

"While Scrum's primary goal is organization and project management, Lean is more about optimizing processes in order to quickly produce quality products. It can be your first step toward adopting Agile principles, or it may be something that your team evolves to, when Scrum isn't enough. I invite you to read my team's story, and how we evolved from Scrum to a more Lean-ish development process."

I recently discovered a very cool project on NuGet - FluentAssertions. This is a really funky little library that vastly improves assertions in your unit tests, whether you are using NUnit or MsTest.

So I tried to give some examples of when NUnit (what I use) is much nicer and more readable then this project. However Diigo comments deletes some special symbols like [ for some reason. But the point was that this article only compares to MsTest, not NUnit which can be quite readable.

"Some of my favorite blog posts that I've read in the last several years focus on the subject of developer turnover, and I think that these provide an excellent backdrop for this subject. The oldest one that I'll list, by Bruce Webster, is called "The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea Effect," and it coins an excellent term for a phenomenon with which we're all probably vaguely aware on either a conscious or subconscious level. The "Dead Sea Effect" is a description of some organizations' tendency to be so focused on retention that they inadvertently retain mediocre talent while driving better talent away"

"One of the things I like most about working in software development is the fact the for the most part you get to work with fairly intelligent people. I've always wondered why so many smart people manage their career so poorly."

"Since the release of .NET 4.5, you've been able to use the RTM version of Async & Await. There are some things though that can lead to very weird behaviors in your applications, and a lot of confusion."

"It's good habit to get back to basics and really understand why you hold principles so that you can judge whether or not they are appropriate in the circumstances you are in. Today's little nugget of principle is to write expressive code and avoid magic values in your code."

"With this post, based solely on my own opinion, I wanted to give those people the simple yes or no answer to their question, and here it is: "Is Silverlight dead 2012?" Yes, it is. IF and ONLY IF your target is Joe Blow playing FarmVille on his iPad while watching "[YourCountryHere] got talent"."

"Microsoft StreamInsight consists of a set of programming tools, and most of what is written about StreamInsight is written specifically for programmers. But what if you are, for example, a database administrator or data analyst without an extensive programming background? You're wondering if StreamInsight might be a solution for a problem you have, but the existing documentation leaves you scratching your head."

"Consider the following method signatures: IEnumerable Process(List input); IList Process(IEnumerable input); Of the two, which is the better choice? Write down your answer."

"Let's look at this implementation through the lens of the Rule of Modularity. The above code fails the "simple parts, clean interfaces" sniff test."