April, 2010

The Proposal Design Pattern

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 24/04/2010 - 22:23

I've finally finished a write up on the Proposal Design Pattern. This design pattern was originally presented in the November 1997 issue of Object Magazine, and hasn't really been seen since. I've been intending on writing this for some time, but the words never seemed to flow - until now.

The essence of the pattern is that real world “changes of state” are almost always agreed upon by accepting a proposal of that change that has been prepared in advance.

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On Naming and Convention ...

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 18/04/2010 - 10:41

Richard Dingwall has a good blog post talking about one specific case where a naming convention goes bad and starts hindering, instead of helping, development.

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Unit Testing 102

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 15/04/2010 - 17:00

Slides from today's presentation Unit Testing 102 are now available for download here.

A zip file of code from the presentation will be attached shortly.

Spoken Numbers

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 15/04/2010 - 08:00

Here's a little utility function that adds an appropriate suffix after numbers to show them as they might be said:

/// <summary>
/// Format a number as it would be said.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="aValue">Number to format.</param>
/// <returns>Formatted number with suffix.</returns>

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Using TypeConverters with WPF

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 12/04/2010 - 08:00

I'm working on a little project at the moment which is dynamically building a WPF user interface based on a configuration file loaded when the application starts. This involves code to manually create all of the bits and pieces that are normally specified directly in a Xaml file.

One useful shortcut I've found is to leverage .NETs built in TypeConverter framework - the same technique used by the Xaml loader itself.

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Things to install on a new machine

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 10/04/2010 - 14:37

Roy Osherove has posted a list of things he installs on any new developer machine, including links so you can find out more.

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NAntGraph v2.1

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 08/04/2010 - 08:25

A new release of NAntGraph2 is available, with the following changes:

  • Now build separate source and binary distributions
  • Fixed output assembly name and build location for NAntGraphUI
  • Fixed unified versioning

Go to the NAntGraph home page to download either the source or a ready-to-run binary distribution.