December 4, 2012
.Net 4
Migrating to a Code-First or Model-First approach to database development can be very liberating. At the end of the day your database is just a way of storing state, so getting away from the implementation details can really help speed up development and allow you to focus your efforts. Code First’s awesomeness aside, when you try and implement this kind of paradigm shift within a team you unlock a different set of problems. Here are two potential ways to alleviate some of the headaches.
November 29, 2012
General banter
For the last 15 odd years we have continually expanded the amount of information available at our finger tips year on year exponentially. Thank you Internet for all your glorious contributions to our lives. Only recently has staying connected to the internet on a Mobile really started to take this to a level where I can truly say that I really am "connected on the go" and as far as technological achievements go that is a pretty amazing achievement to witness in our lifetimes.
November 28, 2012
C#
Geeky salesman have spent decades selling us a pipedream of the end of “Tree based communication”. To date not much has changed and I’m not holding my breath. In the mean time, what do we do with all this paper? If like me you are dabbling with ways to get your code to convert the physical to the digital, I’ve got news for you: Smarter people have already solved the problem for you and it’s simply a matter of plug and play.
October 2, 2012
General banter
We’ve all been guilty of it in our development careers at one time or another. When starting out using a language or framework that you’ve never used before you often have no choice but to. What I’m talking about is the act of “copy paste coding”, and it’s as common in the programming world as chewing gum under seats. When you copy and paste other developer’s code into your application it’s important to fully understand what the code does before you continue; or risk joining the many fools that have gone before you.
September 26, 2012
Automation
When writing testable code your first port of call is often to abstract any dependencies and make them easy to mock. This is the same for any of your codebase that talks to FTP servers. Testing the way your code behaves under real world conditions makes integration tests important regardless of abstraction though. Here’s a simple trick to test FTP code in the wild.
September 13, 2012
Tips and Tricks
When you include .Net 2.0 mixed mode assemblies in .Net 4.0 or .Net 4.5 projects you often have to add some start up options to your project’s config file to get it all to play nice when your app starts up. This backwards compatibility feature is great as it allow you to use older/non supported projects in your recent work.When when using Visual Studio 2012’s new unit testing tools this magical piece of app.config code doesn’t seem to help though, and the solution is pretty simple.
September 11, 2012
Conferences
These days we’re lucky. SSL is becoming pretty pervasive. Facebook uses it. Twitter uses it. Most modern start ups now use it. Sadly there are still other sites or services that you may be accessing on the internet that are still insecure allowing others to listen in on your internet usage, and for these your want an encrypted VPN link to route your traffic through. VPN’s can be expensive though if all you have is a home PC and a laptop on the road – lucky for us this can be a magic combination that is all you need and saves the day.
September 10, 2012
Conferences
Today marks the official start to Microsoft’s TechEd Australia Conference on the sunny Queensland Gold Coast. With over 4 days of talks, product launch education, hands-on labs along with device and software manufacturers spruiking their wares, it is sure to be a great week – if you are around shoot me a tweet so that we can try and cross paths during the week.
September 6, 2012
General banter
In the IT industry employees experience a weird phenomenon once they begin to move up the ranks. You often start work in IT because you get to build stuff, monitor things, and watch your creations grow. The weirdest thing about this is that in our industry to step up in your career you often have to actually stop producing things. To move into management put down the tools, and loosen your grip on what you love.
August 26, 2012
Continuous Integration
I’ve been a long time supporter of Visual Studio Web Deployment projects. Not because I built ASP.Net websites and wanted to compile them, but more because they held so much unadulterated power from the simplicity of just being an MSBUILD file inside your solution. With the launch of Visual Studio 2012 Microsoft has made the call to no longer support WDP moving forward. This made me sad; but I was just being naive. Visual Studio 2012’s Publishing profiles are even more powerful, and they bring all your old friends along for the ride.