OCG developers

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This article aims to describe why I think that DDD aids you tremendously in creating robust and flexible applications."

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).

The Microsoft .NET platform, originally introduced in 2002, is mature and it provides developers with great options for creating software that can meet the requirements of any project. With many options, though, it can be difficult for today's .NET developer to choose the correct .NET technologies for a project. Addressing this problem, Telerik has assembled its senior technical leaders to produce the Microsoft Platform Guidance 2012. This document attempts to provide prescriptive guidance for .NET developers trying to determine the best .NET technologies to use for specific software challenges.

"The below 11 points are what I have learnt via projects, my own experiences, and my own reading. I personally think it has helped me a lot when it comes to DB designing."

"As soon as you have more than a trivial set of tasks you'll need a better system than a simple list and for agile teams, we have Scrum's product backlog."

"While Visual Studio 2012 Professional supports several new technologies (for example, Windows Store apps and the ASP.NET Web API), the Visual Studio team seems to have taken the opportunity to concentrate on creating a "better IDE.""

"Properties are rarely necessary and, in many cases, they make your classes hard to extend and difficult to debug. And they make code much larger and more complex than it needs to be."

"No matter which source control system you decide to use, there are a number of universal principles that will help you to get the most out of source control."

"Making code reusable through public class inheritance (PCI) is so convenient and easy that to say it should be avoided may sound a bit heretical. After all, isn't this what OOP is about? And yet that's the position I hold."

"Instead of waiting until the end of a project to ask 'what worked and what didn't, why not use regular retrospective analysis as part of the development process  to find out what is, and isn't, working, and learn from the conclusions there and then?"

CQRS, while a relatively simple concept, still brings a lot of assumptions about what CQRS is and should be. So what is CQRS? Simply put, CQRS is two objects where there was once one. We're splitting code infrastructure down to the data layers between commands and queries. But the assumptions around what a CQRS should be lead folks I've seen down paths of unnecessary complexity. Complexity around the architecture, and especially around the UI.