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July 2005

Poison 'em While Young

To me, a big believer in necessity of high-quality education, it is mind boggling to see how learning gets marginalized and commercialized. Here’s a picture of an assignment for a 4–6 year-old child. Read this blog post

7/26/2005  | Discuss this post12 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Stripping SPAN from WebControl

Whenever I develop custom server controls, I pretty much always run into weird issues. I don’t know if it’s me, or server controls are tricky. Read this blog post

7/26/2005  | Discuss this post20 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Chaining Delegates with Return Values

While reading Developing Application Frameworks in .NET by Xin Chen I came upon an interesting gotcha with chained delegates when each of them returns a value. Read this blog post

7/23/2005  | Discuss this postNo comments yet  |  No TrackBacks

Signs of Aging Dell

This very honest synopsis came from the demo of a recent game (taken verbatim): Read this blog post

7/17/2005  | Discuss this post6 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Attitude Toward Learning

Again, from Coder To Developer by Mike Gunderloy: If there’s one thing that distinguishes good developers from the rest of the pack, it’s an attitude toward learning. Good developers just don’t stop learning. There’s always some new part of the software universe to explore, some new language to learn, or some new tool to test-drive. As you hone your own development skills, I urge you to make use of the resources of the Internet to continue learning and exploring. Read this blog post

7/17/2005  | Discuss this postNo comments yet  |  No TrackBacks

Book Review: Stop Stealing Sheep

Back in May Dan Cederholm, of the SimpleBits fame, posted a call for typography resources. Having only basic understanding of typography (we all got a little bit of it in us) I scouted the comments and ended up ordering Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works. Read this blog post

7/4/2005  | Discuss this post2 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Putting Atlas on the Map

I’d like to clarify my position on the notion of Ajax as a follow-up to a previous post on this subject. So far I’ve seen people run around with Ajax banners, chanting: “Ko01, now that Mozilla and Opera finally support XMLHTTPRequest, I can populate a list of cities in a given state!” or “I can haul images without a page refresh!”. I see lack of direction and understanding of what to do with out-of-band requests as well as clear vision (a “road map”, in Dubya’s lingo) of where to take it. Read this blog post

7/4/2005  | Discuss this post3 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Book Review: Pragmatic Unit Testing In C# with Nunit

Pragmatic Unit Testing by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas is a great example of how you present a large and important subject in plain English, with no marketing pitches, political dogma or religious fights. It covers methodology of test-driven development (TDD), but in contrast to thick volumes of boring academia, it gets right to the point. It is quite a skill to fit it all in only 150 pages! Read this blog post

7/4/2005  | Discuss this postNo comments yet  |  No TrackBacks

Unit Testing Private Methods with VSTS

Another thing I’m digging about Visual Studio Team Developer Edition with two shovels is ability to run unit tests against private methods and properties. Books and articles on "traditional" testing with NUnit are quick to accuse you of improper design if you have private methods which you want to test. As a rule, their suggestion is to reconsider your design and declare private methods as public. Read this blog post

7/3/2005  | Discuss this post3 comments  |  No TrackBacks

Impressed By the Visual Studio 2005 Team System

I’ve finally installed beta 2 of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS) on a Virtual PC image. VSTS blew me away! Of the exciting things about it is how unit testing tools are gathered under one roof. Currently, you have to run around the internet downloading NUnit, NUnitAsp, a mock object library of your choice, something for code coverage, a Visual Studio.NET add-on that does it all for you in the IDE and doesn’t actually crash, etc. Read this blog post

7/1/2005  | Discuss this post2 comments  |  No TrackBacks