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Test Driven Development in the Time of Dragons
Well, the office is abuzz with excitement over TDD. I could not be more pleased! I am genuinely happy that we are actively moving toward embracing developer testing across all of our applications. I...
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Tools of the Trade
I'm a programmer who is interested in much more than just putting in my eight hours a day and drawing my paycheck twice a month. I want to excel at creating software. Learning to do so will be a...
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Actual Items - April 16, 2008 Edition
Here's an actual code snippet from a user details page I saw recently: ... //Get FeedbackGetFeedback();//Get Paid InvoicesGetPaidInvoices();//Get Actions:GetActions();//Get AddressGetAddress();...
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True Tales of the South - Vol 1
Returning to Austin recently from a friend's wedding in Athens, GA, Wife and I had a layover in Houston. While Wife was napping, I spotted a guy at our gate furtively picking his nose. I nudged Wife...
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Continuous Integration and You
OK, so it's not really about you. It's about me. I had to have something to pique your interest though, didn't I? I wrote this up for my team at work a while back, and I thought I would share it...
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Tracking Technical Debt in ReSharper
I love ReSharper. It's purely platonic. After all, I am a married man. But it's always there for me: my trusty little sidekick, my own personal Sancho Panza. Its array of helpful features is truly...
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Parsing YAML files in Ruby
I've been messing around with rake lately, hoping to find a build tool that is fairly well documented, well-supported, and doesn't make me dig through a pile of angle-brackets. At work, we store all...
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My new favorite Resharper feature
I love the Find Dependent Code menu option in ReSharper. If you could see me now you would see a blissed out smile on my face and a bunch of cartoon hearts and flowers shooting out the top of my...
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Introducing Developer Testing Into an Existing Team - Developer Thoughts
My friend Chad Myers posted recently about Introducting Quality-first Notions Into an Existing Team. Since you are such a devoted fan of my blog, you undoubtedly know that we have recently introduced...
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Introducing Developer Testing Into an Existing Team - Project Manager Thoughts
Last time, I posted our developer's thoughts on the answer to this question: What was the tipping point for you that helped you decide automated developer testing was a worthwhile thing?Here's what one...
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Parsing YAML files in Ruby - Part 2
I wish I had a clip reel I could roll after a dude with a really deep voice said, "Previously on Parsing YAML files in Ruby". But I don't. So here's a link.Ruby is Narnia. I spend my real life in...
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Tracking Technical Debt in ReSharper - Follow-up
Wow! The good folks at JetBrains found me and gave me a link! Thanks guys!If you remember, we're still in the land of waterfalls, where everything has a signature and an arbitrary deadline, and a...
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Boba Fett, Greedo, and the Strategy Pattern
Bounty hunting is a difficult line of work. Think about it: 1) Jobs are generally consulting gigs rather than full-time employment. 2) You're brought in at the last minute, usually to clean up...
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Boba Fett, Greedo, and StructureMap
"Austin, Texas. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."These words were uttered by an inhabitant of the the wastelands around Austin. Shrouded in mystery,...
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NDepend, or a Young .NET Programmer's Illustrated Primer
BootstrapsI have said before that I have no axe to grind against Microsoft, and I stand by that. They set out long ago to have a computer on every desktop and Microsoft software running on every...
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Refactoring Legacy ASP.NET Code-Behind with ReSharper
I've been on a refactoring kick lately. And with the state of the legacy code at my office, I'll be refactoring for a very long time to come. This is a write-up of a refactor I did at work, altered...
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Announcing: the Dale Smith Valued Professional (DSVP) Program
UPDATE: Scott Bellware has just made the grade as well. Welcome to the program, Scott!UPDATE: The DSVP program welcomes Louis Salin. Way to go Louis!Karl Seguin (among others) is a bit miffed about...
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Rake. Huh?
Lately I’ve been using rake at my office to build .NET solutions with Derick Bailey’s wonderful albacore gem. But I’ve had lots of questions from others on my team about rake:1) What the heck is rake?...
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Rake Fundamentals: rakefiles and tasks
Ok, what is Rake again? Rake is a collection of Ruby scripts that live deep within the bowels of your Ruby installation. Since you made sure you checked the box that adds the Ruby stuff to your PATH...
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Rake Fundamentals: tasks with prerequisites
Rake tasks can have other tasks as prerequisites. That means that a tasks prerequisites are executed before the task itself when the task is called from the command line. Just like Nant, if you have...
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Rake Fundamentals: file tasks
The file taskThe “file” task keyword is a call to a method called, you guessed it, “file()”. Like the directory task, it’s purpose is to create the thing that it names. But making a file is a bit...
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Rake Fundamentals: directory tasks
A build system is about building software. And on a purely mechanical level, the work of building software is largely about creating files and moving them around. The task keyword is the general...
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Rake Fundamentals: FileLists
In the last post, we created a rakefile that will copy a discreet set of *.bin files to a package directory for distribution using a single “publish” task. But it’s pretty verbose. We can refactor a...
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