Trumpi's Blog

Filter that dotnet.org.za main feed!

trumpi — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:17:00 GMT

Do you subscribe to the dotnet.org.za main feed? Is go4download annoying you?

Yeah! Me too!

So I decided to create a Yahoo Pipe to filter those posts out. You can grab it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/trumpi/dotnetorgza.

Blogalogue: What makes a developer “senior”?

trumpi — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:40:23 GMT

A colleague recently blogged about how we are struggling to find senior developers. He remarks that there is no shortage of “senior developer” CVs, but when placing candidates under examination, they do not meet our expectation of “senior”. We are often very underwhelmed: some candidates cannot even correctly answer questions that we expect a junior developer to be able to answer.

It has come to the point where we have decided to screen candidates over the telephone before meeting them in person.

Now I want to ask the world: What do you think a senior developer is? What are your expectations of a senior developer? Let’s start a blogalogue about this: Post to your blog what your expectations of a senior developer are. Link back to this post too so that everyone can get to your opinion in the trackbacks.

I will post my opinion in a few days.

Our daily link (2008-03-13)

trumpi — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:19:38 GMT

Sorry about the lack of categories yesterday. I was really lazy.

Web

ValidatorCalloutExtender does not kick flyout after first submit click
app_offline.htm - if you need to take your web site down for an upgrade or maintenance, then use this little known trick.
Secrets of JavaScript Libraries - a look behind the scenes of some popular Javascript libraries.
Testing TempData, and Mocking SessionState
How to know the all the data in the cache of an Asp.Net Application - very useful for when you need to optimise your cache.
Testing RedirectToAction in ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC: Securing Your Controller Actions

Career stuff

Steve Yegge on Interviewing - Get that job at Google!
The Enid Blyton effect - Kennith Roper describes how introducing a wiki to your team could go wrong.
Thoughts on Google's 20% time

Blogging

Post To Your Blog Directly From Google Docs - I don't think I'll use tihs feature just yet, but it is good to know anyway.

Misc

The Weekly Source Code 19 - LINQ and More What, Less How - I didn't finish reading this one - maybe you will.
Dev Environment for PowerShell - aka How to configure your dev environment using Powershell. Quite useful.
How I lost my WinDbg virginity - Using WinDbg to find ASP.NET memory leaks. I really need to learn these low level tools.
Did you know... You can use the Task List to create User Tasks that are separate from your code? - #171 - Yes I did know. Now you do too.
Internal Stripping - It's not what you think.
All code will eventually go stale - Interesting thought.
Extension methods for expressive code

Our daily link (2008-03-12)

trumpi — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:50:02 GMT

Our daily link (2008-03-10)

trumpi — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:34:48 GMT

Misc

Powershell

2008 Scripting Games - My solutions

Web

Internal IE-HTML DOM still isn’t XHTML compliant
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site - some nice tips from Yahoo!
JavaScript WebDAV Client

Asp.NET

Agile / Software design

Our daily link (2008-03-09)

trumpi — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:27:22 GMT

Daily link is back after 2 months.

Misc

Software

Subversion 1.5 alpha2 released

ASP.NET / MVC

ASP.NET MVC Test Framework Integration Walkthrough
Tip/ Trick: Preventing Session Loss when using Cookieless sessions with TreeView and Menu controls
Disabling a Trigger Control During Asynchronous PostBack
Binding keyboard shortcut in Asp.Net - one way to let your web apps use keyboard shortcuts.
Maintain Scroll Position after Asynchronous Postback
Testing ASP.NET MVC Controllers with Typemock Isolator

Career stuff

Six thinking hats - looking at a decision from all points of view.

Is CultureInfo.InvariantCulture variant?

trumpi — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:57:39 GMT

My mother always used to teach me to write date parsing code that passes the Turkey Test. So to parse a date from a configuration file, the following snippet is used:

        DateTime timeOverride;
        bool res = DateTime.TryParseExact("27/03/2008 12:30:00", 
            "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, 
            DateTimeStyles.None, out timeOverride);
        Assert.IsTrue(res);

This works great! It always parses the date as 27 March 2008 and res is true.

Except on one particular machine. On this rogue machine TryParseExact always returns false.

Any ideas? We're looking like fools because it doesn't work on one machine.

Your top 5 blogs

trumpi — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:49:56 GMT

Question: If you could read only 5 blogs, which blogs would you read?

You can either post it in the comments or write your own post linking here.

Our daily link (2008-01-23)

trumpi — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:02:43 GMT

jQuery

Agile

Software

ASP.NET

Misc

Our daily link (2008-01-16)

trumpi — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:29:09 GMT

Software

It is amazing what traceroute will reveal

trumpi — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:00:20 GMT

Our daily link (2008-01-15)

trumpi — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:10:14 GMT

I'm quietly spending my last week of leave at home...

Agile and Project Management

Why do Some Projects Continue to Push Unrealistic Software Development Schedules? - it makes no sense in the long run.
Continuous Integration: From Theory to Practice 2nd Edition - Nice booklet on builds.
Use Cases vs. User Stories
TDD Is Also An Organizational Process

Misc

Understanding version control - I was naive. This is a good read highlighting all of the different forms of version control. Contrary to my belief, there is more that 3 kinds.
TypeMock Snippets For Visual Studio - I'm installing these. It will probably shave several minutes of my unit testing time.
SSIS vs. CSV - Ayende complains about one of the many shortcomings of SSIS - lack of proper CSV support.
COALESCE function instead of long CASE WHEN ... ELSE (T-SQL) - Nice SQL tip
Build your own CAB #17: Boil down the "wiring" to a Registry - the latest in Jeremy D. Miller's series on the MVP pattern.

Career stuff

No Silver Programmers - "The significant thing is not that some professional programmers are awesome, it's that some professional programmers suck." Larry O'Brien challenges the notion that the best developers are 20x more efffective than the worst.
Heroes and Villains - This article looks at how we are cultivating an anti-team mentality in the software industry.
You Are Creating Bugs In Your Software
Yet another reason to raise my rates
Bad Programmers Are Not Good Programmers Who Are Slow
Why Your Manager Doesn’t Like To Throw Away Work (And You Do) [via Link Listing]

Our daily link (2008-01-13)

trumpi — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 12:54:27 GMT

Going to watch Elton John tonight, so this post is a little early.

Agile

Avoid mega unit tests - 500 lines for a unit test? Something is wrong...
Agile Absolves Developers -"Agile increases responsibility." Nuff said. [via Interesting Finds]

Web services

Creating RESTful Web Services with Windows Communication Foundation - this article contains the most detailed explanation of REST that I could find and explains how to implement REST using WCF.
REST, SOAP, WS-* and SOA: Oh My!

New blogs

Gray Matter - A blog by Gray Knowlton primarily focusing on the MS Office "Open Xml" formats.

Career stuff

10 Absolute "Nos!" for Freelancers - don't get schnaaied.
10 Fail Proof Tips for Delivering a Powerful Speech

Misc

Catching Handled Exceptions During Debugging - Useful hint.
Datejs - An open source JavaScript date library.

Podcasts

Hanselminutes #96 - Starting Small with F# with Dustin Campbell

Our daily link (2008-01-12)

trumpi — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:15:00 GMT

I'm back from holiday with over 1000 feeds to read. I also got my new gigabit router today. Heard bad things about it from Amazon, but we'll have to see...

Agile

What do you wish your CEO knew about Agile?
Your first ***** stinks! - I don't know whether the stars are kleene stars or just censorship.
Why You Should Test Your Requirements - because they can be wrong.

Software

The much exaggerated death of the WiX toolset - WiX is not dead.
Votive in WiX v3.0 now supports Visual Studio 2008 - Title says it all
To Release an Unbuildable TreeSurgeon? - there is a problem with the new NCover - it is now commercial and cannot be bundled with TreeSurgeon.

Career stuff

Billy Martin's Technique for Managing his Manager - I've used this one once or twice :)
No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem - "Do you like the company of your teammates on a personal level? Do you respect your teammates professionally? If you were starting at another company, would you invite your coworkers along? Do you have spirited team discussions or knock-down, drag-out, last man standing filibuster team arguments? Are there any people on your team you'd "vote off the island" if you could?"

SQL

What's wrong with COUNT(*)? - A look at the performance implications of COUNT(*). (Hint: There doesn't seem to be any for SQL Server 2005 SP2.)

Misc

Managing Config Files
Handling Multiple Environment Configurations with .NET 2.0
Why are INI files deprecated in favour of the registry?
Log4Net Config to Make Your Loggin' Rockin' - a very nice log4net configuration. We use it too.
Code Review Check List - A good high level list of things to look out for in a code review, but seems more like a test list to me.
AutoMockingContainer and ASP.NET MVC: Round 1 - Kyle Bailey talks about a problem with Jacob Llewallen's AutoMockingContainer and how he solved it.
Visual Studio 2008 New Multi-Threaded Debugging Feature - This is so cool!
Did you know... How to close just the selected files you want? - Another cool VS tip.

Our daily link (2008-01-02)

trumpi — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:09:46 GMT

I've been checking out JQuery today. It is fantastic!

C#

In C#, When to use String verses string - There are also two different pronunciations of 'tomato'. [via Daily Bits]
Tip of the day: Double question mark - very coelescy!

SQL

SQL 2005 HTTP Endpoints - this is like stored procedures, but they look like web services.

Misc

Zotero - this may be useful for bloggers to collect info. [via Daily Bits]
Software Development Predictions for 2008 - I like number 2 in this list.
Did you know... You can change the RSS feed on the Visual Studio Start Page? - No I didn't. Thanks!
Rethrowing exceptions and preserving the full call stack trace - save yourself a lot of pain and follow this guy's advice!

Web

Improve maintainability of ASP.NET databinding - let the compiler do more for you.

Humour

And now, an LOL cat translation of the Bible - hilarious, yet uplifting.