Jimmy Bogard -

How not to do Dependency Injection, in NerdDinner

Checking out the NerdDinner code the other day, I found a common Dependency Injection anti-pattern. One of the core concepts of DI is that components are not responsible for locating their own dependencies. The code went part of the way to...

Published Fri, Jul 03 2009 12:19 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Refactoring, ASP.NET MVC, StructureMap

Congrats to the Los Techies MVPs!

This morning, I and fellow Los Techies alumni Eric Hexter and Chris Patterson learned that we are MVPs! Well, technically I learned last night through an IM of a re-tweet of my MVP lead, but hey, close enough, right? I know it’s cheesy, but...

Published Wed, Jul 01 2009 9:03 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Misc

How we do MVC – View models

A while back, I went over a few of the patterns and opinions we’ve gravitated towards on our current large-ish ASP.NET MVC project, or, how we do MVC . Many of these opinions were forged the hard way, by doing the wrong thing many times until we...

Published Mon, Jun 29 2009 11:06 PM by bogardj

Filed under: ASP.NET MVC, AutoMapper

Expressions Cheat Sheet

I started getting really tired of looking up the translation between the ExpressionType and concrete Expression type (they don’t match up), so I created this cheat sheet that has each ExpressionType, derived Expression type and a simple example. ...

Published Wed, Jun 24 2009 10:36 PM by bogardj

Filed under: C#

The Filter-ViewData anti-pattern

In just about every website you go to these days, its layout follows a very similar pattern: You have some static resource logo, a large main section with information that our controller action supplies. But we also have some other stuff, those...

Published Thu, Jun 18 2009 11:08 PM by bogardj

Filed under: ASP.NET MVC

More on Late-Bound Invocations with Expression Trees

Recently, I went on a bit of a tear in the AutoMapper trying to improve performance. Besides the threading issues I introduced (dictionary lookups are NOT thread safe, in case you’re wondering), I looked at improving the performance of the reflection...

Published Wed, Jun 17 2009 9:04 PM by bogardj

Filed under: C#

Why opinionated input builders for ASP.NET MVC?

When we first started looking at crafting forms for MVC in a recent big project, we had just completed a ton of “view” screens for a wide variety of information. Having learned quite a few things on crafting HTML on the view side, we had a few goals...

Published Mon, Jun 15 2009 10:00 AM by bogardj

Filed under: ASP.NET MVC

Requesting features for AutoMapper

On the AutoMapper mailing list , I get a lot of what I consider wacky requests. Not because the requests aren’t valid, but rarely do I get any context of what people are trying to do with AutoMapper . As a reference, we are using AutoMapper...

Published Sun, Jun 14 2009 9:08 PM by bogardj

Filed under: AutoMapper

Simplest versus first thing that could possibly work

One of the core XP practices that resonated with me quite early on was the concept of simple design. When I learned TDD, this practice was further refined with the concept of doing the “simplest thing that could possibly work”. To make a test...

Published Wed, Jun 10 2009 10:58 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Design

Defining and refining conventions

At last night’s ADNUG talk, Jeremy Miller talked about Convention over Configuration, and many of the principles the Rails community embraces. He showed a few examples of opinionated software, such as FubuMVC. One thing I would have liked...

Published Tue, Jun 09 2009 9:35 AM by bogardj

Filed under: Design

Reflecting reality

Reading over the latest MSDN magazine issue, I’m always encouraged when I see something that I consider important on the cover, Test-Driven Design . It covers one of the more difficult technical aspects of TDD, which is mock objects. It took...

Published Sun, Jun 07 2009 11:18 PM by bogardj

Filed under: TDD

Fighting technical debt with the wall of pain

Technical debt, even on the agile-ist of agilista teams, still accumulates. Debt is inevitable, as initial design is always based on assumptions, not all of which pan out. I never view that as a failure, as all we can do is make the best decision...

Published Wed, Jun 03 2009 8:57 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Agile, Refactoring

Meaning of life

Wolfram Alpha knows all: From OMG to OMFSM , we now move to OMWA.

Published Thu, May 28 2009 9:48 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Misc

PTOM: Black-box analysis of legacy applications

It seems like such a great situation, you’ve been tasked with replacing an old legacy system with a shiny new Web 3.0 AJAX-ified replacement. It’s your chance for the limelight as the knight in shining armor to come charging in with a new system...

Published Wed, May 27 2009 11:20 PM by bogardj

Filed under: Legacy Code

Subverting TDD as a design tool

So TypeMock can now mock DateTime.Now . Replacing the functionality of DateTime.Now, which is an external dependency, was one of the first issues that taught me the value of TDD. With TypeMock replacing DateTime.Now, I get all the benefits...

Published Fri, May 22 2009 9:29 AM by bogardj