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TDD FizzBuzz Code Kata using Machine.Specifications
After I read Jeff Atwood’s article claiming that some interviewees for programming jobs are unable to write even the most basic code, I thought I would have a go and see how I got on. As an extra...
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Installation–The Poor Cousin of Development
As developers, we tend to ignore installation for as long as possible, hoping there will be a quick ‘wizard’ we can run that will abstract the problem away. Utilities such as InstallAware,...
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Visual Studio 2012 Express–Now even better for hobbyists
For the last decade or so, Microsoft had made its excellent developer tools available for free to anyone with an internet connection. The so-called Express editions have targeted a specific language (C...
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Why using NGen on your assemblies may not be as smart as you think
NGen.exe is the native code generator for .NET assemblies and is sometimes used during an application’s installation process. NGen takes the assembly’s IL code and precompiles it into native machine...
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The Evil of Mutable Structs
I was fascinated by this question from Stack Overflow after watching Jon Skeet and Rob Conery discussing it on TekPub TV. The main takeaway is this: mutable structs are evil. I rewrote Jon Skeet’s...
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An Adventure in Cloud Computing
I’ve recently had reason to use Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to set up some build agents for a software project I’m working on. We use TeamCity as our continuous integration build server....
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Ode to a Software Geek
Here’s a little verse that my girl geek wrote for me. It is so nice to have a partner who really understands a lot of the technobabble I come out with Ode to a software geekYou are my key and my...
View ArticleThe Life and Times of a Software Project
Just for fun, here is a visualization of work on a software project I was involved in (The ASCOM Platform). In this video, each second of real time represents about 10 calendar days.The project begins...
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CI Build with TeamCity, Git and GitFlow workflow
BackgroundOver the past few months I’ve been slowly revising my approach to version control and continuous integration. Until recently we used Subversion (svn) for our version control but I wanted to...
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Entity Framework 5: Adding Support for Indexes via Data Annotations
I’m in the middle of developing my first serious project using Entity Framework 5.0. I’m using ‘code first’ or, more precisely, ‘UML first’. We author our entities using Visual Studio’s UML editor...
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Threading is Harder Than You Think
I’ve been tinkering with multi-threaded code recently and also re-reading Jeff Richter’s book, CLR via C#. Jeff presents a wonderful example that really illustrates how you can burn your fingers in...
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New Paradigms of Code Re-use
One of the great benefits of object oriented programming was supposed to be easy code re-use. In the past, I’ve always found it somewhat less easy in practice. I have been using Subversion for a few...
View ArticleThe Case of the Null Coalescence Illusion
Nothing marks you out as a rookie programmer faster than blaming the compiler when your code doesn’t work, but sometimes, just sometimes, the compiler actually is at fault. Today, I discovered one such...
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Why are Developers Stuck in the 1980s?
Are you a hacker or a craftsman? Clean code and SOLID design principles: surely these are concepts that any developer writing code in an object-oriented language must be familiar with in this day and...
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The Art of Computer Programming
There are plenty of mediocre and even downright bad computer programmers out there. So what is it that makes a good programmer? Is it the ability to solve difficult problems, or to write fancy code...
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A C# Developer Delves Into Java- Finite State Machine
In a radical departure from my normal fare, I decided to have a got at writing some Java. I’ve looked at other people’s Java code and often thought how much like C# it looked, it is certainly...
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ReSharper 8 LiveTemplates for Microsoft RiSE Code Contracts
Save the following XML into a file with extension .DotSettings, then it can be loaded as a settings layer in ReSharper. It defines LiveTemplates for quickly inserting Code Contracts. The snippets...
View ArticleHow To Avoid Strong-Name Signing Your ASCOM Drivers
Back in 2011, I wrote a blog post titled “What’s in a Strong Name”, in which I made the assertion that ASCOM drivers MUST be strong-name signed. This is the case for a COM component (which ASCOM...
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Object Oriented Motor Control for .net Micro Framework
See https://bitbucket.org/tigranetworks/ta.netmf.motorcontrolNetduino Object Oriented Motor ControlThis project implements various types of motor control for Microsoft .NET Micro Framework in C#. The...
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