April, 2009

DataBinding Goodness

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 27 Apr 09 - 4:24pm

There's a lot of "goodness" buried in WinForms databinding that doesn't get to see the light of day. Here's one example I discovered just today ...

Jira and Confluence for $5!

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 21 Apr 09 - 10:36am

Here's a good deal ...

As an Atlassian customer, we wanted you to be the first to hear today's news: For this week only, we're offering a special 5-user "starter" license of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We're calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it's our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we're going to donate every penny to charity, so please help us spread the word!

How not to set up Tests

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 17 Apr 09 - 10:15am

Some unit tests on a project were newly failing - I'd done the checkin immediately before the first failure, so it fell to me to sort out the problem.

Defining Polymorphism

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 7 Apr 09 - 8:06pm

Saw an interesting question on StackOverflow today: Polymorphism - Define In Just Two Sentences

Reading the answers, it seemed to me that everyone was getting bogged down in the technical aspects, and was missing the essential point of the term.

Sometimes we work too hard

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 7 Apr 09 - 5:25pm

Sometimes we developers do things the hard way for no better reason that not knowing that a better way is there.

We are not our Users

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 5 Apr 09 - 9:33pm

We developers often approach software development as though our end users are just like us. Unfortunately for our end users, this is seldom the case.

How do our end users differ from us? Here are three ways.

Of Colour and Presentation

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 4 Apr 09 - 12:38pm

The careful use of colour – of hue, saturation and lightness – can improve a user interface greatly.

Sometimes the best use is to avoid distraction, allowing people to concentrate on differences that matter; sometimes the best use is to add information, revealing differences that were previously hidden.

Mark Miller (of DotNetRocks and DevExpress fame) spends a lot of time focussing on this area, treating it (rightly, in my opinion) as a competitive advantage.