OCG developers

"Because frameworks are so good at making decisions for us, we get lazy. Instead of thinking hard about how to build a clean system with crisp abstractions, we think about what the framework would want us to do, regardless of whether the resulting code is clean."

"The migrations feature of the Entity Framework includes a Seed method where you can populate the database with the initial static data an application needs."

"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."

"Service Locator is a well-known pattern, and since it was described by Martin Fowler, it must be good, right? No, it's actually an anti-pattern and should be avoided."

"Lately I've been talking a lot about rich client applications written in HTML and JavaScript. These are frequently referred to as "SPAs" (Single Page Applications). I call them SPAs myself - it's cute and flows easily off the tongue. Unfortunately the phrase "single page application" badly misrepresents the true nature of this architectural style."

"Testing for exceptions in unit tests can be tricky. [..] The guys that designed xUnit understood the shortcomings of testing exceptions and took a much cleaner approach."

"The book Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests states that you should never mock interfaces that you don't own. When I read that it caught me off guard. After all faking third party libraries that talk to databases or the network is the primary use case of a mock object right?"

"Does your company let you work from wherever you want? If it doesn't, it may be watching as progress passes it by. The next generation of working doesn't require a desk."

At which point do you refactor code to make it clean?

"Everybody's gotta love their IValueConverters, right? [..] However, they're a bit of a pain when it comes to Xaml. [..] Not anymore with this quick tip."

"I'm getting really tired of all blog posts that states that service locator is an anti pattern. It's not."

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff.

TechEd Europe 2012: maybe not the most professional of talks, but it gets the point across of how to do estimation and project management using Scrum.

TechEd Europe 2012: LightSwitch is an application framework from Microsoft that takes much of the repetitive code you write in a typical application out of your hands. Very impressive. It comes with a Silverlight and a HTML5 client.

TechEd Europe 2012: typically, we write down requirements somewhere and then use it as the starting point for development. In the talk we see how these two worlds can come closer together: a requirement can be a failing test that development has to fix.

TechEd Europe 2012: a whirlwind overview of the many new features in the upcoming release of the .NET framework.

TechEd Europe 2012: great talk about SignalR, the lightweight messaging system that allows you to have a real-time connections between clients or between the client and the server. Imagine visiting a web page and having everything you do appear instantaneously in the browsers of all other users that are visiting that page. Think chat clients, collaborative editing, etc.