May 2007 Blog Posts
Phil Haack just posted an update about the benefits of moving to Subsonic as a way to get strongly-typed stored procedures. He includes this bit:
I don’t know about you, but I find it a pain to call stored procedures from code. Either I end up writing way too much code to specify each SqlParameter explicitly, or I use a tool like Microsoft’s Data Access Application Block’s SqlHelper class to pass in the parameter values, which requires me to remember the correct parameter order (it actually supports both methods of calling a stored procedure). What a pain!
Now, I'm not upset...
I said yesterday that
The skill sets [of developers and QA people] aren't simply unrelated—they are, to an extent, opposed.
I think that deserves some explanation because for some reason this is not obvious even to people in IT.
The reason that developers and testers require fundamentally different skill sets is that they have fundamentally different responsibilities. What it comes down to is that it is a developer's job to make software work and it is a testers job to make "working" software break. In fact, I knew I had found the right QA Manager for XanGo when one of the first...
I wrote last month about winning arguments in IT. Earlier this week, Phil Haack asked a question (through Twitter) about things he could do to help convince a company to create an in-house QA department. Well, it turns out that I did exactly that at XanGo—successfully pushed for and oversaw the installation of an in-house QA department. I thought it might be a useful follow-up to the previous post to use this as an example of how I "won" that argument.
Concentrate on What is Best for the Company
This is the key, the whole key and nothing but the key to winning...
Oh my. Steve McConnell has started a blog. If you do not know who he is, you are either young in the ways of software development or aren't paying attention.
via Haacked
Technorati tags: Software, Development, Steve McConnell
I consider this good news: It looks like Feedburner is being bought by Google. I use Feedburner and love it. It offloads a lot of my bandwidth, allows me to manipulate posts specifically for the feed, and it gives me interesting statistics. I think Google will likely do good things with it. At least, I've never heard of something being bought by Google and then sucking where it hadn't sucked before.
Also, I notice that this gives the investors in Feedburner 1000% profit in four years. No wonder venture capitalists take so many weird risks when some of them win that...
I listened to a recent .Net Rocks podcast about Domain Driven Design. Now, despite reminding me of a post last week by Secret Geek about how everything is driving design these days, I think a lot of what was said makes sense to me. Eric Evans' point on the podcast seemed to revolve around learning a given domain and letting experience with the domain drive development decisions.
From the contents of his book at Amazon, it looks like Eric's idea is a modification or extension of Model Driven Design—i.e. an attempt to unify development efforts within a descriptive framework approachable by non-technical...
In perusing the release notes for Subtext 1.9.5, I noticed that Subtext now implements "Identicons". "Eh?" sez I. Not that I don't know what identicons are. They're a way to encode a web address in a manner that makes each address graphically unique with related addresses adopting a similar look.
Reading Phil's post, you can see identicons at work in the comments along with Gravatars (which Subtext has had for a while now—they're a central repository of an image representing you based on the email address associated with the post). Now, I've been meaning to implement gravatars in my Subtext...
First post exclusively on the new, IT-focused blog. Cool.
We've had a lot of turn-over at my current place of employ lately. We've lost most of the Operations team and all of the Accounting team in the last couple of months. It's not hard to see why: those departments are caustic and frustrating. In contemplating the turn-over, I realized that I really like working in IT.
It's not just the technology. I like working with the people in IT. Sure, we have our share of jerks and anti-social Neanderthals, but even they are at least interesting.
Maybe I've been able to call...
Developers hate it when someone changes the requirements in the middle of a development project. What few have realized yet is that they've gone and changed the requirements to be a developer right in the middle of our careers.
An Unnecessary, But Illustrative, Story
The summer of 1994 found me in Mesa, Arizona, new-minted diploma in hand, getting ready for my first real job. A couple days before I was to report for the new position, I received news that the job that I had pulled my wife and baby daughter into the gods-forsaken desert for had, well, been eliminated. Not a happy piece of...