Archives
-
Not Estimating and Tracking your Projects? Expect Failure
Estimating software development projects is one of the hardest things to do. First, programmers just don’t like doing it. And why should they? They are usually incorrect and may feel the heat when their estimates slip. Secondly, most programmers just don’t have a method or process by which to develop an estimate. I will lay out some simple steps to follow to help you on your way to actually “loving” to provide estimates. Yes, loving it. Because if you can be right most of the time, wouldn’t you love it too? If you come up with a process for estimating, you will be on your way to being right a large percentage of the time!
-
5 Things you did not know about me...
Thanks to Craig Shoemaker for tagging me on the "Five Things"<g>. So, here we go, here are five things you probably didn't know about me:
-
Use Close and Finally
In the last 2 weeks I have had two different clients complain that there are "memory leaks" in .NET. I tell them very politely, that most likely it is their code!<g> In both cases it was their code. The first case had to do with the programmers using a DataReader and not closing them when they were done with them, or they put the Close() method call within their Try block and not in a Finally. The second case involved the StreamWriter in the File.IO namespace where once again the file was not always being closed correctly due to the programmer not putting the close in the Finally block. Below is what the original code looked like:
-
Beware of Encoding Types when saving to a File
I learned something today... I was doing some Encryption of strings using DPAPI and converting them to a Base64 string and everything worked fine when I was encrypting and decrypting. However, when I saved the Base64 string to a file, then re-read the data and tried to decrypt the data, it would not work. It took me quite awhile to figure out what was going on.
-
Wrap it up!
In our daily programming with .NET, we often find new things to use. In some cases Microsoft tells us there is something new to use. Take the case of moving from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. Remember in .NET 1.1 how you used the ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("MyValue") to retrieve values from your .Config files? Then when .NET 2.0 came out and you attempted to upgrade your project, now all those lines of code were marked as Obsolete and a bunch of warnings were generated in your project.
-
dnrTV
On Wednesday, January 3rd, I got together with Carl Franklin and filmed an episode for his Dot Net Rocks TV (www.dnrTV.com). This episode is on, what else, creating your own custom providers. In this show I walk you through creating providers from the ground up. Carl informs me that this episode should air around the first week of February.
-
The Provider Model Rocks!
In the last few weeks I have started on a new endeavor. I am rewriting my PDSA Framework from the ground up. I figured that it is time to once again take everything I have learned over the last few years of working with .NET and re-architect things a little better.
Past Blog Content
Blog Archive
-
2015
-
2014 (18)
-
2013 (11)
-
2012 (19)
-
2011 (29)
-
2010 (19)
-
2009 (28)
-
2008 (0)
-
2007 (14)
-
2006 (6)