archive: 2008

2008

Maritime User Group Tour '08 Wrapup

Last night I finished up my final presentation on a tour of the Maritime User Groups. This was the first time that I’d been out to the Maritimes and I had a blast during the whole trip. Unfortunatel

Fall events

It seems that every spring and fall the developer world seems to ramp up and developers around the world flock to conferences and user group events. For me this usually means I’m out and about for th

Anonymous Access to SVN Repository for IglooCommons

I’ve had a problem with the anonymous access settings for my VisualSVN installation that is hosting IglooCommons. It just didn’t work without prompting for credentials. Understandably, no one seemed

Recruiting firms

My past experience with recruiters has been at a level that I put on par with my recent experiences with newbies to my team. Today I got this from a guy I know who just changed jobs through a new rec

Starting projects

I had an experience today that made me…well…flat out fucking angry. When you start working with a new team, on a new project, at a new company…heck whenever someone can point at you and call you the

Bricks and Sponges

I had a conversation the other day with Tom Opgenorth about the trends you see when you’re ending a contract with a client. Our experiences both show that during the life of a project the client will

Class naming

In the process of writing one of the chapters in the brownfield book, I started thinking about class naming. Some time ago I remember hearing someone saying that they didn’t much like the use of clas

NHibernate on WCF

Note that I have posted two follow up discussions on this along with a number of code changes. They can be found at: WCF and nHibernate redux A little more WCF NHibernate I know that there are a few

On this great day...

The majority of Canadians will be celebrating Canada Day and the creation of our country. Lost on the majority of the population is that July 1st also marks a day of great sacrifice. On this day in

Announcing the ALT.NET Canada Conference

For the last half a year a group of us (Bil, James, Dave, Terry, Justice, Greg and Kyle) have been organizing the first ALT.NET conference in Canada and today, on Canada Day no less, we are announci

DotNetRocks Brownfield episode

Kyle Baley and I did an interview with Carl and Richard recently where we talked about ecosystems in the context of a brownfield application. Show #354 was published this morning and can be found her

Communication Waste

For the last few months I’ve been on a steady mission to absorb as much about lean software development as I can. This morning I got up and decided to enjoy the morning air, slight breeze, my Zune an

Separation of Concerns

I know this has been beaten to death in some circles (521,000 results in Google, 2,551 results in Google’s blog search), but it bears repeating until people start paying it some attention. Separation

Overloaded Methods as WCF OperationContracts

Interesting find today. It is possible to create a WCF Service Contract that has overloaded methods on it. The compiler doesn’t complain at all. You can even attribute both as [OperationContract] an

Great Indian Developer Summit wrapup

Right after the completion of DevTeach in Toronto, I hopped a plane to India to present at the inaugural Great Indian Developer Summit being put on by Saltmarch Media. First let’s say that the flight

DevTeach Toronto wrapup

As always DevTeach was a blast this time around. It was good to catch up with some of the people that I haven’t seen for a while. This was my first time at the conference where I had a full slate of

JetBrains Academy

This has been sitting on my desk for a while and I feel like I’ve been ignoring a good thing. JetBrains has setup a site that they’re calling the JetBrains Development Academy. The whole purpose of

DevTeach Toronto 2008

DevTeach is just around the corner again. I’m sitting here tonight putting the final touches on my presentations and I’m thinking about all the things that I enjoy about my trips to DevTeach. I migh

Building community one developer at a time

I’ve been working in this industry for a number of years and through that time of progressed from being somewhat competent at showing up for work to now being somewhat competent at showing up for work

What happens in Seattle, stays in Seattle...

Or so Dave thought. Tonight at the MVP Summit a few of us Canucks decided that we should embrace the international flair of the event. Instead of just hanging with the Canadians and the people that w

Places I'll be

I figured I should put up a bit of info about my plans for this spring’s conference season. So here they are. April 14 - 17, MVP Summit…and of course Party with Palermo. I’m only an attendee at this

Subversion migration

I don’t know if I finally won the battle at my current contract or if the stars just all aligned for me this week. I’m helping the company to takes its first steps away from Visual SourceSafe and int

Principal of Least Privilege

The Principal of Least Privilege is the concept of running with the lowest permission set possible. Historically we developers tend to run on accounts that have Administrator level privileges. It’s

Brownfield Application Development in .NET

Some of you may have been wondering why my blog posting has trailed off. Others will have been thanking the Gods that it has. Still more of you couldn’t care less and….ooo…look….shiny. Over the pas

Pursefight owner revealed...

Hey Bellware, sorry you had to take the beating for my statements and comments on the pursefight, that was not the intent. And to make it official to everyone, Scott Bellware is NOT the author of the

Edmug Speaker Idol -- Call for Speakers

Edmug is changing it up for our March meeting. We’re looking for five to six untested speakers who would like the chance to make 10 minute presentations on technology that they’re passionate about.

Heroes Happen Here (being Edmonton)

For one day only get your heroes here! Microsoft is launching Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 (not really “launching” as much as promoting the delayed release) and Windows Server 2008. Edmonton’

Presentations...are they about audience comfort?

Daniel Moth has written a post called The ABCDEFGHI of setting up Visual Studio for Demos. Some of his points are great. Things like using the default colour scheme, larger fonts and maximizing the sc

How do you structure your project -- details

Oren posted about his “2 project” solution structure recently. It seems that developers are caught on this preconceived notion that a Visual Studio project must be directly related to a compiled asse

How do you build your application -- details

Kyle posted about an ongoing conversation that he and I have been having for the past couple of weeks about code compilation practices. As expected, there was some disagreement with the practice that

OracleParameter AssociativeArray bug in ODP.Net 11

Today I was writing some code that was wrapping up stored procedures for an Oracle database. In one situation we were needing to retrieve a result set based on a list of values that we had in memory.

Nothin But C# v3.5 Edmonton

It’s official. I will be offering the Nothin But C# v3.5 course in Edmonton during the week of March 31st to April 4th. If you’re familiar with JP‘s Nothin But series of courses, you’ll know what th

Victoria Code Camp '08

If you’ve got the time this weekend, and you’re in the area, drop by the Victoria Code Camp. There are some brilliant speakers at it this year and Tom, Dave and I are presenting in an attempt to ensu

Setting environment dependant properties in nAnt

This is a little something that I discovered recently while writing some nAnt scripts. I love to have One Script to Compile Them All so that I can ensure that the build server and all the developers

Controlling the unit test environment

My last post talked about abstracting the implementation of an IoC container so that you could implement more than one container if you had the need to. One of the coolest uses of this kind of abstra

Always wrap up your third parties

Today I was working through some code refactoring when I came across my implementation of the Castle Windsor container exposed off of the Global.asax file. I had put it there because I needed to get

Training -- Nothin' But .NET 3.5

As you’ve probably already read on JP’s blog, I’m going to be doing some training through him starting this year. The first course that I’ve been designing is a take on his Nothin’ But series and sty

ReSharper 3.1 gotcha with .NET 3.5

My current project is working in .NET 3.5 and, of course, I’ve pimped my IDE with some ReSharper goodness. I’ve noticed one thing that is making me itch for the day that ReSharper v4 comes out. If y

Was it a failure?

The last contract that I finished up was very trying on many fronts. One of the things that they sold me on during the hiring process was the fact that they were following Agile practices. On arriva