OCG developers

LINQ expressions and their associated extension methods have greatly improved developer productivity ever since their introduction in .NET 3.5. Unfortunately, like any code abstraction, it can hide execution details that can come back to haunt you in performance problems and odd behavior.

Some time ago, the development team at my firm staged a revolt against the sales team and senior management: our demand was that no Statement of Work was to be sent to a customer without first being reviewed by a member of the development team. [..] Today I would like to explore an important aspect of any Statement of Work: the pricing model.

Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm. [..] Hopefully this article will help you gain an understanding of the basics of Big O and Logarithms.

It is natural to think of the public methods and properties of a class as the public interface of the class. When implementing a class that is meant to be derived there is also another interface - the one meant for child classes. A clear separation of the two interfaces makes the code cleaner. The one construct to avoid is public virtual methods.

In general, developers do not like to give presentations. In fact, they dread it. This is unfortunate because presentations can be a powerful asset. Most individuals cannot survive a long career without presenting on occasion. Others may have the courage but lack the proper guidance to present effectively. Whatever the circumstance, developing good presentation skills is easier than learning a new technology. The process rarely changes. Learn it once and reap the benefits. 

Public discourse on this topic tends toward the extremes. I participated in a recent discussion which started with someone worrying that his company will have to support Microsoft Surface in addition to Android and iPad, and ended with someone saying, "Or you could use HTML5 and get all three platforms for free."

Roy Fielding writes a PhD dissertation describing the architectural style of the World Wide Web. He coins the term 'Representational State Transfer' (REST) to describe it - after all, if you're going to talk about something, you need to give it a name. Somehow, in a semantic shift of epic fail proportions, the term REST has also come to mean something completely different to most people, a 'style' of writing web services. This style has no agreed protocol.

I don't want to write this article. I believe there is no way to provide advice about listening without sounding like a touchy-feely douchebag. But I'm going to write this article because there is a good chance that your definition of listening is incomplete, and what I consider to be obvious and simple ways to listen are not obvious at all.

LinkedIn [..] is a social network that I could never figure out. [..] So after years of "paying" to be a member of LinkedIn, I asked myself, what value am I getting from this network? I have 306 connections, but what does that mean?

I was pondering over the thought: agile is nice and all, but how can we sell it to customers that have a more traditional way of thinking about projects? This blog article gives some good food for thought on these matters.

But there is another technological shift conspiring against many web frameworks that isn't focused on performance, but instead focused on "ease of use" - which in many cases may hit far closer to home.  That shift is the reorganization of MVC. 

The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project.

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. You can develop apps that will take advantage of all the great features that we have added, including new features in Windows 8. We are also announcing the availability of the .NET Framework 4.5 reference source code, under the Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL).

I have a very simple rule, I like to follow that helps to simplify my code. "Don't validate developer input" This rule simply means that we should not try and validate input that came from a source that is not a user or external system.

In C#, Action<> and Func<> are extremely useful tools for reducing duplication in code and decreasing coupling. It is a shame that many developers shy away from them, because they don't really understand them.

I've found that there are three basic types of duplication that we can eliminate from our code that successfully build on each other.

I've recently seen one to many application where the developer try to be safe by catching exceptions all over the place. [..] Most of those catch blocks just logs the exception and rethrow it. Please do not catch that exception.

Git is the source code version control system that is rapidly becoming the standard for open source projects. It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things with branches, and rewriting history. What a pity that it's so hard to learn, has such an unpleasant command line interface, and treats its users with such utter contempt.

My system is a combination of thinking from Stephen Covey, David Allen, and J.D. Meier's Getting Results. All of these systems are highly recommended and I've pulled much of what I know from them and then synthesized my own ideas. Here's what I do when I'm feeling non-productive and guilty.