Archives
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Being saved by...unit tests
The time comes in every developers life when a higher up requests what they think is a minor change. You think about it and agree also thinking that it would not take too much time. It is only when you get back to your desk, check out the code and look to where the change is going to happen when you realise the worst. If you make a change here what repercussions will you introduce, is it possible you could introduce a defect in the code which could then go on to really crap up the application. This happened to me last week, luckily I already had some unit tests in place covering the code which was in need of changing. I knew what the method in question was going to return, and so did the unit tests. I made the necessary changes and re-run the tests. Fantastic they all pass. The code checked in, the tests passed again and the nightly build was successful. The moral to this little tale? Introduce unit tests as soon as you can to test your code. As Ian Cooper points out:-
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Singleton in action
I had one of those 'wow that's cool' moments last weekend. This sounds really sad and you may think that I need a life, but I was playing with the code for a basic singleton pattern found at:-
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Protect your job...perhaps by learning new tech goodies
It is in the news so much recently that there is no avoiding the fact we are either in or about to go in to a recession (here in the UK that is). There is already job losses in the tech industry, wether these losses were going to happen anyway, and now is a good time to blame the economic outlook is not a topic I am trying to cover; this has been covered here. What I am trying to address really is how do you protect your job? And if you do loose your job, how do you improve your chances of getting straight back in to employment?
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Configure SubSonic for a Windows application and sort out the table names
Web or Windows applications?
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A quick getting started guide to SubSonic
This is a post originally published on my previous blog over on Blogger. I have copied it here as I very rarely go to my old blog anymore and this info may be of some use to someone out there.
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Autumn of Agile
Following on from the Summer of NHibernate, Stephen Bohlen is now treating us to an Autumn of Agile. The initial screen cast has been published, go check it out here :-
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No pressure then...
Now some of you out there know pressure when they experience it, but shed a thought for the NASA engineers fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. There has been a malfunction in the Science Data Formatter which is responsible for downloading data to Earth based stations, NASA want to switch over to the redundant unit which hasn't been used since pre-launch. Now if this doesn't go according to plan, then potentially the HST is useless. Add to that pressure because Atlantis is posed for launching to service the HST, albeit not this component therefore if it doesn't work that mission could be scrubbed. Then add to that more pressure as Atlantis is not able to get to the ISS in case of emergency, then Endeavour is also ready to launch as a rescue vehicle.
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Auto-generating help with NAnt and CC.net
We are about to be audited here where I work. That is the IT department, not the company as a whole. As part of this we have to get all our IT documentation up to scratch. One problem being we don't know when they are coming and what exactly they are wanting to look at. So as far as we can see we have three areas of documentation:-