Today’s tip comes from the “Anally Retentive” department. In the .NET CLR team likes to keep their lines of code under 110 characters long. I’m assuming that they’re trying to maintain consistency and readability. I often try to maintain an…
Blog Archives
Convenient Synchronization with Mesh and DropBox
A couple of weeks ago, I finally signed up for DropBox. If you’re unfamiliar with the service, it’s a file synchronization service. You install a client on multiple machines, and you get a special folder (aka a dropbox). When you…
Tip for success – Track your accomplishments
When it’s time for your yearly performance reviews, how do you convey all of the great ideas you’ve had, the money you’ve saved the company, and the customers you’ve delighted? My suggestion is to start keeping track of your accomplishments.…
Advantages of a 3rd party diff/compare tool
I recently spent nearly an hour trying to figure out why all of my unit tests stopped working in a particular class. It turns out that I had accidentally deleted a single character in one of my strings, but the…
ClearType in Remote Desktop with XP
A new feature in XP SP3 that should of particular interest to developers is ClearType over RDP (remote desktop protocol). If you occasionally use remote desktop to work from home, or work remotely to your development machine, please read on.…
.NET Development Perf Testing in a Cloud VM (EC2)
If you haven’t heard, Amazon’s EC2 service provides cloud-hosted virtual machines. Initially, they just supported Linux machine images, but recently have allowed Windows machine images. This means that you can create on-demand hosted virtual machines accessible from anywhere. I decided…
Design your classes for their consumer
I’m going to describe a methodology that will help you save time by writing better classes, and will help simplify your life by allowing you to solve problems with a top-down approach. Developers such as myself often have a tendency…
How to get the best customer service for free
Today’s tip is a hack for getting awesome tech support from a company for a product that you may or may not have purchased. It may not be polite, but it may be a method of last resort. We all…
Programming for someone with blinders
One of your goals as a developer should be to make your code as readable as possible, both for yourself, and for the other developers you work with. One great way to determine if your code is well written, is…
Using objects or repository interface in constructor
I’ve been really trying to use the Single Responsibility Pattern in all of the classes I design. Recently, I needed to create code to query a list of holidays from the database, and then create a method that allows you…
