With the points-mini-series still fresh in the mind now seems a good time to say publicly something which I’ve been saying privately for a long time. Avoid points based contracts. i.e. don’t outsource work, or undertake work, on the basis of points - be they story points, abstract points, nebulous units of time or any other name you give them. have one client at the moment who wants their software supplier to sign a points based contract, I’ve advised against it. Why do I say this? Put it another way: any measurement metric will change behaviour once it is used for control.

This is the pattern I find myself in day after day while practicing TDD or BDD. Step 1? Usually I start at the whiteboard. It is the easiest place to start as I sketch out the scenario I want to program, but not always. Sometimes a mockup file (image, html, or xml) is provided and I start at the result, sometimes I’m give a scenario already in English, and sometimes I have to fiddle with the code first to see what’s happening. No Beginning, No Ending The great thing about the circle is no matter where a start, the flow should always be there in the end.

One of the problems with running JavaScript in the browser is that everything usually executes on the same thread as the UI. With most scripts this is fine because they are short executing however if you start doing more complex calculations you might run into the vase where the UI becomes non responsive because of the JavaScript executing. And when that happens you will see one of these dialogs popup and you are at the mercy of the end user, not the best of places to be. This has to be a URL, you can’t just pass a function, something that would have been handy. 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: Start.

There are some interesting debates out there around scaling ASP.NET. How do you do it? Please fill out this poll and tell the world: Interested in a blog post on this? Take it to the comments section. Cheers, @mkennedy Filed … Continue reading → Polls.NET ASP.NET MVC polls web

I had a little fun today playing with ‘==’ vs. the Equals(…) method. knew that somewhere in.NET 2.0 I believe) there had been some improvements in String.Empty versus “”, but I didn’t quite realize that this affected all string literals. In the code below you can see how value types and reference types may behave differently when using ‘==’ versus the Equals method. My surprise came when I discovered that line 39 and 41 both return TRUE. Apparently the string literals in an assembly get put in a master list of string constants and then reused where the same string literal gets used. 64: {.

Richard and myself receive a batch of Microsoft Windows Embedded licence keys. Having only ordered four we were a bit amused by the size of the box they came in.

This is a relatively small release, only 2 real changes. EmailApprovals Better Rdlc Syntax Email Verification Almost every site sends some sort of email. These have been hard to test, usually requiring some sort of email to be actually sent. Now you can simply say: EmailApprovals.Verify( new MailMessage()) This is particularly nice with a [UseReporter( typeof (FileLauncherReporter))] As it will open in your desktop email client (like outlook, not gmail) making it very easy to see the results. In this release I am taking advantage of the anonymous enumerator syntax. Email Rdlc Reports C