OCG developers

"This course covers the general purpose query facilities of Language Integrated Query (LINQ)"

"Interfaces are wonderful for a language like C#. Interfaces give us everything we need to work with an object in a strongly-typed manner, but place the least number of constraints on the object implementing the interface. Interfaces make the C# compiler happy without forcing us to pay an inheritance tax for working with a class hierarchy. We'll define an interface that describes exactly how we want to fetch customers and how we want the customers packaged for us to consume."

"This blog poses a rather radical premise. It suggests that Refactorings have counterparts called Transformations. Refactorings are simple operations that change the structure of code without changing it's behavior. Transformations are simple operations that change the behavior of code. Transformations can be used as the sole means for passing the currently failing test in the red/green/refactor cycle. Transformations have a priority, or a preferred ordering, which if maintained, by the ordering of the tests, will prevent impasses, or long outages in the red/green/refactor cycle."

"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."

"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."

"Unit tests don't find bugs. They find regressions. This is a painful lesson I learned when I first started doing TDD (test-driven development), and it's well known among most TDD circles."

"Recommendation: Go for the lightweight Factory Delegate approach. As with all patterns, use with caution and watch for overuse & abuse. In particular, if you need to manage state between multiple delegate, fall back to the overriding approach, because you can keep the state in the subclass."

Imagine if we wanted to display a list of enums within a list, and we actually wanted to have more descriptive values, friendly names if you like, but still maintain the underlying enum value selected where required. This article will show you how to do the following, using WPF.

"After a good discussion with a colleague for the merits of code review I thought I should give some of the reasons I use as to why a development team should adopt a code review process."

"All code can be classified into two distinct roles; code that does work (algorithms) and code that coordinates work (coordinators)."

"This is the cone of uncertainty, a measure of the accuracy of our estimation of effort as we get closer to finishing work. Very close to finishing, we have a very good idea of how much is left. As we move away from the time to completion, the variance of our estimates increases drastically."

"I often hear people say something like "if you need it once, build it. If you need it twice, abstract it." People often say then in the context of the "DRY" - or Don't Repeat Yourself - principle. [..] The idea of DRY needs to be tempered with YAGNI - "You Aint Gonna Need It". With that, we end up with The Rule Of Three, and it clearly says that code can be copied once but the third time you need it, you should abstract it."

"[..] I'm going to assert that something similar exists with regard to motivation, and examine six timeframes: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years."

"Here's a few unusual things about C# that few C# developers seem to know about."

"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"."