Version control systems manage the changes of documents. In software development, their primary purpose is to store the source code for an application, as well as every revision created during its development. Currently, many developers use a centralized version control…
Blog Archives
Common Pitfalls when working with DateTime’s
In .NET, the DateTime structure provides us wonderful functionality, but this seemingly simple structure can cause a lot of headaches if you don’t fully understand how to use it properly. Understand the terminology First, UTC, GMT, and even Zulu time…
Practical .NET Unit Testing – Free paper released
I’ve been working on a unit testing paper that sums up my experience in unit testing, and discusses some of the core information that I feel is important about the subject. It’s very much a work in progress, but I…
Speaking at Day of .NET at Fox Valley Tech
If you’re interested in hearing about writing practical unit tests in .NET, I’ll be speaking at the Fox Valley .NET user group “Day of .NET” event May 9th! Here is the synopsis for your reading pleasure: Want to learn how…
Maintaining Consistent Line Lengths
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…
Is Quality Important?
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood stirred up some debate when they said “Quality just doesn’t matter that much”. At first, I was a little outraged. My entire development process is built around quality. Without it, airplanes would fall from the…
Don’t lose your code – 3 methods that can help
Inevitably, you’ll lose power to your computer, have a hard drive crash, have lightening strike, accidentally delete code that hasn’t been checked in, or encounter some other crazy scenario that I can’t even imagine. What is your plan? Read on…
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…
