May, 2009

Want to get more done, faster?

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 30 May 2009 - 11:17pm

Situated Geekery
Several of the tips that I included in my recent user group presentation Towards Maintainability were oriented towards improving the quality of the code - making it easier to understand, safer to modify, and so on.

A recent post How TDD and Pairing Increase Production on the Situated Geekery Blog is making a similar point, though from a different perspective - that of increasing productivity now rather than maintainability later.

Windows 7 Taskbar ... Like!

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 30 May 2009 - 10:36pm

I took the plunge last weekend and installed Windows 7 on my primary home machine. Slightly risky, but I figured since it was good enough for many others, it wasn't too big a risk.

Basically, Windows 7 feels like Windows Vista, but polished. It's all the little things that make a difference.

One of the big differences, though, is the revamp of the taskbar - while you can change it if you choose, the default presentation is icon based, not named.

I like it - a lot.

Towards Maintainability - The Links

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 27 May 2009 - 7:20pm

With due apologies for the delay, here is a list of links relevant to last Wednesdays presentation, Towards Maintainability ...

Definr.com - an online dictionary with crosslinks for synonyms and other related words.

FxCop - static analysis of compiled assemblies reporting on potential areas for improvement.

Gendarme - Open source equivilent to FxCop, from the Mono project.

Getting the small things right

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 25 May 2009 - 2:26pm
message.png

It really bugs me when an application shows me a message like the one shown here.

I'm willing to agree that, overall, it's a minor issue - but the poor use of language really bugs me, and it makes me suspicious that maybe the rest of the application has had an equal lack of attention to detail.

Is CruiseControl.NET worth the effort?

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 24 May 2009 - 2:51pm

Let me begin by saying that CruiseControl.NET certainly delivers on it's core promise as a Continuous Integration server - once everything is properly configured, the system ticks over well.

However, "Once everything is properly configured" is the sticking point.

Towards Maintainability

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 20 May 2009 - 9:04pm
Slide1.JPG

Here are the slides from the talk I gave tonight at the Wellington .NET users group ...

Updated 15 June: I've now posted the Towards Maintainability presentation as a PDF

I'll post a followup shortly with some links to resources and tools mentioned in the talk.

An Event Snippet

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 17 May 2009 - 9:06pm

Original posted April 2008, updated May 2009 with a revised version of the snippet.

Following on from my recent post about code snippets for property declarations, I thought I'd share the snippet I use for event declarations.

Talking at the User Group

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 13 May 2009 - 1:53pm

I'm giving a presentation on "Towards Maintainabiility" next Wednesday (20 May) at the Wellington .NET users group ...

False positive from Gendarme?

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 9 May 2009 - 10:41pm

I'm coming up to speed with Gendarme, the open source assembly inspector.

Mostly, the tool seems to deliver on its promise, but I'm having a problem with a false positive.

The EnsureLocalDisposalRule rule is intended to flag situations where Disposable instances aren't properly cleaned up.