Community Blogs

I was just randomly browsing the web and came across a recent blog post by Giovanni Bassi (translated to English via Google) and saw that he had a few screens of the new functionality in the Visual Studio Team System Rosario April 2008 CTP which included: UML diagrams Sequence diagrams (generated via code analysis) Activity diagram Interesting. Read More...

If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps. Syndicated from Loosely Coupled // Tim Marman's Weblog | Slashstar ( rss ) Read More...

Huge title while the subject or the example in this case is actually very simple and straightforward. I saw a question on newsgroups which went something like: - poster states he doesn't know much about control events - he/she asked if he/she had a method like protected void tbPreRender(object sender, EventArgs e) { tb1.Attributes["value"] = tb1.Text; tb2.Attributes["value"] = tb2.Text; } wired to two separate TextBoxes Prerender event, is it fired twice? He/she hoped that ASP.NET would deal this somehow that it would be called only once, like SQL Server does with subqueries. First thing to note in this case of course is that ASP.NET cannot do much assumptions, due to its generality, it does what it can in the most common...

I just ordered some more books, on recommendations from a few of my peers. I'll post my thoughts on them once they've arrived and I've had a chance to read them. The Art of Agile Development: James Shore, Shane Warden: Books Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (The Agile Software Development Series): Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck: Books Domain-Driven Design Quickly: Floyd Marinescu, Abel Avram: Books For those of you who have already read these, what did you think? Which one should I read first? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Read More...

Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re...

Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series): Michael Feathers: Books I've just finished the above book, which was recommended to me by Jeffrey Palermo a few months ago. It is one of the most useful software development books I've read since Code Complete . I wish I'd read it years ago, and I'm finding myself refactoring and rethinking my approach to current systems I've been working on for some time to make them more testable and easier to work with -- and I'm already seeing improvements. Seriously, if you're writing software, you should buy this book and move it to the top of your professional reading list. It's the book that Refactoring should have been, in that it is a very easy read with...

h2.entry-title {font-size: 1.1em; clear:left;} ul.hfeed {list-style-type: none;} li.xfolkentry {clear: left;} img.item {float:left;height:75px;} div.entry-content {float:left;width: 75%;} ul.more, ul.tags, address.author {display:none;} h3 {clear:left;} Here's another monthly installment in my news wrapup series. I've fallen into publishing them at the end of the first week of the month, because so much stuff seems to happen in the first week of each month that it'd be a shame to sit on it for three weeks. Please comment if these are wrapup posts are valuable to you. I'm harvesting them from my ma.gnolia feed, so if few people are reading them, I'll just point you over to that feed and dispense with all the html formatting...

I interviewed a couple of college students earlier this week for internship positions with Lake Quincy Media , and one of them reminded me of my own college days when we were graded in part based on how well commented our code was. In school, comments are typically there as a "check the block" measure to ensure that the professor doesn't take off points for not having them, but in the real world comments can actually serve a good purpose. One of the things you learn with experience is the difference between comments as a waste of space that clutters up your code files and comments that are actually meaningful. However, for the purpose of this post, I'm going to look at a specific case, which is comments that indicate an Extract...

Secret Server has supported a "Mobile Edition" for over a year now but it is always tricky making sure that it works correctly on all devices. Our approach was to bake mobile support into the base product (ASP.NET based) so it simply scales down to the capability of the device.  That sounds simple but unfortunately it depends on making sure that functionality will work with all the limitations of various devices. My own favorite BlackBerry 8820 does a reasonable job of helping me get to the password I need in those emergency but it is hardly a pleasant browsing experience.  In fairness, no browsing on it is particularly pleasant since it is mostly slow, struggles with most layouts and has a small screen.  That said,...

I have found that .NET really lacks in this space, needless to say I've been scouring the web for a decent free UML designer. Annoyingly most of the free UML tools have heavy restrictions on there use ( VP , MagicDraw ), oh and Visio is hopeless for complex diagrams. NetBeans comes with an awesome UML designer built in and supports the 8 core diagram types. The discouraging thing about the Visual Studio space is there hasn't been word of class diagrams, or the modelling space in general since MS announced support for C++ class diagrams in March 2007 . With all the designers that are in VS now for literally anything you would sort of think that this UML stuff would of crept in somewhere along the line. Maybe in the next VS release there...