February 2008 - Jimmy Bogard - Los Techies : Blogs about software and anything tech!

Setting the default browser inside Visual Studio

My default browser is Firefox , and has been for many, many years. But that's not everyone's favorite browser, nor is the one they have to use all day long. When developing web applications for clients, it's important to know what their browser...

Published Fri, Feb 29 2008 9:01 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Tools

The Gmail rainbow

I love Gmail, and I really love its labels , but I really really love its filters . I had a hard time following all of the groups I wanted until Joe showed me how to drink from the firehose . Now I get greeted with a nice rainbow in Gmail: With this,...

Published Wed, Feb 27 2008 9:35 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Tools

TestDriven.NET keyboard shortcut

Continuing with the Palermo brain dump theme, Jeffrey introduced me to a keyboard shortcut for running TestDriven.NET tests from a keyboard shortcut. I had been right-clicking and going from the context menu: While the context menu is nice, it has me...

Published Wed, Feb 27 2008 8:42 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Tools

Moving past stored procedures

On Chad's recent SQL-assembly comparison post , a few interesting comments caught my eye proclaiming the glory of stored procedures. From tom (no link): [Stored procedures] are not only useful for speed but also for ACID and to keep business logic...

Published Fri, Feb 22 2008 8:15 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Domain-Driven Design, Rant

NHibernate and xmlpoke

Some time ago I wrote about targeting multiple environments through NAnt . The basic concept is to use the xmlpoke task in NAnt to modify any XML configuration files your application might use. One setting that changes in each deployment we have is the...

Published Wed, Feb 20 2008 9:45 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Tools, Continuous Integration

Last XML serializer I'll ever write

I've made this class probably a half dozen times, and I'm getting pretty tired of writing it. It seems like every application I write has to serialize and deserialize back and forth between XML strings and objects. For future reference, here it...

Published Tue, Feb 19 2008 10:35 PM by bogardj

Filed under: C#

Unit testing MonoRail controllers - Redirects

When developing with MonoRail , one of the common operations is to redirect to other controllers and actions. Originally, I looked at the BaseControllerTester to help test, but it required a little too much knowledge of the inner workings of MonoRail...

Published Mon, Feb 18 2008 9:40 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Patterns, Testing, TDD, MonoRail

Eliminating obscure tests

One of the purported benefits of unit tests and TDD in general is unit tests doubling as living documentation. Unit tests are documentation in the form of executable client code demonstrating small units of behavior. The idea is that if you wanted to...

Published Sat, Feb 16 2008 6:47 PM by bogardj

Filed under: BDD, Behavior-Driven Development, TDD

Getting over the TDD hump

Chad mentioned that the first 2 hours of TDD are the hardest . Without a good pair by your side, the pain can stretch well beyond a couple of hours. Maybe I had a rare experience, but my first experience with TDD was successful and had very few bumps...

Published Wed, Feb 13 2008 8:31 PM by bogardj

Filed under: TDD

Team System and open source

A note to all open source developers in .NET: DO NOT use any exclusive Team System features in your open source projects! Team System and the Team Edition flavors do not mix with open source projects. I opened up the SDC Tasks Library on CodePlex and...

Published Thu, Feb 07 2008 8:30 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Tools

Stories, requirements, and language

The negotiation between client and team on what gets delivered is the toughest aspect of software development that I've encountered. Something that's eased this aspect for me is adopting User Stories and abandoning "Function Requirements"...

Published Wed, Feb 06 2008 9:24 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Agile

Flexibility and control

At our recent Headspring .NET Boot Camp , Jeffrey and I had an interesting conversation with a couple of attendees whose company was considering an all-out VSTS love fest. Already using TFS source control, the company was looking at using the Work Item...

Published Mon, Feb 04 2008 9:02 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Agile

Stuck in proprietary-land

Many years ago, I made the fateful decision to standardize my home music collection on WMA . The bundled software in Windows XP, Windows Media Player , ripped my CDs to the WMA format, for free. At the time, MP3 ripping utilities cost money, or came with...

Published Mon, Feb 04 2008 8:43 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Misc

February 2008 - Jimmy Bogard

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Setting the default browser inside Visual Studio

The Gmail rainbow

TestDriven.NET keyboard shortcut

Moving past stored procedures

NHibernate and xmlpoke

Last XML serializer I'll ever write

Unit testing MonoRail controllers - Redirects

Eliminating obscure tests

Getting over the TDD hump

Team System and open source

Stories, requirements, and language

Flexibility and control

Stuck in proprietary-land