April, 2009

DataBinding Goodness

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!

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How not to set up Tests

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

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

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

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

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.