Aaron Schnieder on ASP.NET

I made a blatantly stupid logic mistake the other day in a business logic layer method that I was writing and got the following exception: “Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.” The problem what I was trying to remove an object from a collection while I was enumerating through it using a FOREACH statement. After I realized what I had done I solved the problem by populating a new collection with a little bit of LINQ.

For a current project I needed to create a table that contained a list of exclusions that should be filtered out from another table when a specific set of criteria were met. This is a pretty common scenario where you have a large table of data and you want to be able to provide the ability through a user interface for a user to filter the data using an exclusion list.

I have been developing and delivering software for over 10 years now and I have learned a few things along the way. I am not the smartest developer, the most elegant engineer or a hardcore software design geek. I have however had a good deal of success delivering software that meets business requirements on time and learned what works and what doesn’t along the way. In this post I will share with you what I have learned that works well and what routinely causes failure.

With all of the recession talk in the news, the daily massive layoffs that are taking place and the general doom & gloom feeling in the air I am very curious about how the recession has specifically effected developer's jobs. I have read many articles on CNN, MSNBC, etc. that have identified "computer programmer" positions as relatively safe jobs during this tough economic time. Have you found that to be true, are your jobs as developers relatively stable?

 I have had the unfortunate pleasure of conducting three different Team Foundation Server - TFS - installations in the last couple of years. Each installation has been difficult to say the least and each installation has presented me with new & challenging errors. To benefit others who need to install TFS, this post is dedicated to TFS installation errors and how to fix them.
If you have a TFS installation error & fix you would like me to add to this post, please put it in the comments and I will get it added ASAP.
Hopefully this post can become a single valuable resource for TFS installation error troubleshooting.

 Windows Authentication is a great way to provide authentication security in your WCF services. With the WSHttpEndpoing and a .NET 3.0+ client Windows Authentication works right out of the box with WCF, everything is just peachy. However, if you want to use the BasicHttpBinding for .NET 2.0 client backward compatibility then it is going to require a bit of configuration for both the clients & server.

I recently needed to setup IIS in Vista (again) to support my ASP.NET & WCF development purposes. Since there are a few different things to remember when setting up IIS in Vista to support development purposes (ASP.NET, WCF, Windows Authentication, etc.) I figured others might benefit from a quick How To.

I have been through a number of interviews now in my career and I have fared pretty well in many of them. While going through the interviews, I have created a mental list of what has worked well and what made a good impression on those conducting the interview. I have also made note of what impresses me (or turns me off) when I am the one conducting an interview.