-
Have you ever read a blog post about TDD, Dependency Injection, or some other concept and thought, “Sounds great . . . if you work in an ivory tower, but I have to work with [insert your code-base here].”? Or maybe you really like the idea but you have no clue how to start without beginning...
-
The Composite Design Pattern This post talks about the Composite Design Pattern and is part of Pablo's Topic of the Month - November: Design Patterns . A Composite is a tree structure where each node can be represented as a common type so that they can be acted on in a consistent manner, regardless of...
-
Pablo's Topic of the Month - November: Design Patterns Back in April, we announced we would be doing a PTOM on Design Patterns. It turned out that April was a busy month for all of us and we didn't live up to our announcement. I think we're going to claim it as a sad April fools joke. During the course...
-
This morning I happened to see the article “ .NET Coding Standard & Code Review Points ” linked from the good folks over at DotNetKicks.com . I was horrified to see some of the very bad guidance being offered here. While I appreciate and applaud the effort and time put in by Mr. Narayan, I...
-
So, what's a closure and why should I care? As Bob Dylan said, "...the times they are a changin'." The strange world of functional programming , once restricted to more esoteric languages such as LISP, Erlang and Haskell, is now invading the mainstream. Languages such as C# and Java...
-
So tonight I got to help demo what a fishbowl was at the ALT.NET Canada (thanks Doc!) conference and the topic of discussion was on the Fundamentals of Software development. During the session I started to realize that what I considered to be fundamental seemed to be far from what others did. After a...
-
Jason Meridth tagged me with this meme, so I'll play along if anyone cares. How old were you when you started programming? I remember being 6 or 7 years old helping my brother open the box for our new Commodore Vic-20 (yeah, that's right baby, RESPECT). My Dad got us a book or two with BASIC...
-
Thanks for tagging me Joey. How old were you when you started programming? I was 11 years old (6th grade) when I started using QBasic to make easy games. I actually knew about the easter egg that showed the developer names. What was your first language? Like Joey I used to write basic apps with QBasic...
-
Many Microsoft employees were at the ALT.NET conf in Seattle -- including many of the ones that have been criticized publicly by the greater ALT.NET community. Not only was Microsoft there, but they were a sponsor and a few employees were even on the organizers list. Many of them only hear our negativity...
-
Introduction Today was my last day with my current former employer, as you may have heard from my (also now-former) coworker. We quit on principle after having several irreconcilable differences of opinions with our management over how to manage and execute a software project. As you might imagine, after...
-
Pablo's Topic of the Month - April: Design Patterns Over the next few days and weeks, the Los Techies crew will be writing a number of blog posts focused a particular subject in addition to their regular blogging. Pablo's Topic of the Month for the month of April is about ' Design Patterns...
-
I went and hung out with some fellow developers on Saturday (at the Grist Mill in New Braunfels, TX , incidentally -- wonderful place!) and we talked about all sorts of things on the way down, there, and back up. One of the things that particularly stuck in my mind was a discussion how there are still...
-
The Liskov Substitution Principle In my first (of hopefully more than one) post for The Los Techies Pablo's Topic of the Month - March: SOLID Principles effort, I'm going to talk about The Liskov Substitution Principle, as made popular by Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin in The C++ Report ....
-
Yesterday was my first day working at my new employer, Bayern Software , with (name drop alert!) Jeremy Miller . We started right off with an easy story doing ping-pong pairing. I really dig this method of doing development (not to mention pairing, not to mention TDD). We started off with a quick whiteboard...
-
Quick Background I admit, I've had a lot of failures with TDD. Mostly they were solo projects and I didn't have the discipline and self control enough to stick with it. I ALWAYS regretted not sticking with it. However poorly I was doing it, it always gave SOME value and saved me from several...