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I think I get XP..
[Update... be sure to read the comments where Raymond Lewallen corrects me]
Ok, after about a year of hearing people write about the glories of Extreme Programming, I think I get it. More importantly, I think I might want to do it (at least part of it). Let me explain what I think I know and then someone else can come behind and correct me.
My understanding of XP is that it starts with this premise: the customer knows what they want, but they can't articulate it, so you get the user to give you the big picture and ask what parts...
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Coding Forensics
[I decided to go a little light hearted today... When I get done writing for How To Select, I'll take some time and post an entry with Code... until then..]
I was thinking today about one of my skills (at least I think its a skill). Recently I have had to touch a couple projects that the developer was no long since gone. In one case I needed to fix theremaining bugs on a project done by a consultant whose contract was over and whose project still had a few bugs. I used a method that I have heard mentioned here...
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ICUI - the reverse of FUD (AKA Offending everyone)
Yesterday, Raymond pointed me to a post where someone was less than happy with me (no, I'm not going to link and I'm not going to explain any more than this). Also, Darrell also told us all on the CodeBetter Blogger's mailing list that someone argued with him about a post he made (I'm also not gonna link). Truth told the person arguing with Darrell didn't really understand Darrell's post; the commenter thought he understood something and decided that he should correct Darrell (it was a similar situation in my case as well).
I couldn't believe it. Darrell doesn't write...
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Learn SQL... It's good for your career...
[Comments have been turned off on this post because I know that it has the potential to create a flurry of comments (read "flames")... if you want to comment on/flame this post then do it on your own blog...]
Ok, after a couple weeks I've decided to indirectly go after some things that were said in the infamous O/R Mapper war (I'm not going to link to it... if you want to search, go look for "Frans Bouma" and you should find it). I hinted at a few things in my "The Database War" post. [Warning: I'm not so indirect when...
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Why AJAX is dangerous... My Daily WTH (What the heck?!!?)
I made an interesting discovery at work today. I finally had to work on a piece of code that I have always found ways to hand off to someone else. It was written by a former colleague who absolutely loved JavaScript and Remote Scripting (aka AJAX... don't argue with me they are the same thing more or less). Every programmer who has ever had to do something with this code has hated it (except the originator). BTW, this is ASP code.
So before I continue on, I would like to ask everyone a question. How many lines of Javascript is too...
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Conflict of Interest
So I just finished working on something really cool at work (that's the day job that I hint at, but never reveal much about because I don't want to be tempted to criticize work and get fired...)
I had to work on a rewrite of a (windows) service that we have that manipulates email in folders in an inbox. We use Exchange and this was formerly done with CDO. CDO has evidently fallen out of favor and so in order to upgrade to the latest exchange this service had to be re-written to use WebDAV (what a cool technology... it probably sucks...
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Encryption article...
Just wanted to point myself and others to a great article on encryption. Eric Marvets writes about Block Cyphers and IVs. Prior to reading the article I would have been able to give you a vacuous answer as to what Intialization vectors (IVs and sometimes referred to as salt) do. I could not have told you exactly how they work. I probably would have said something like "IVs are used to randomize your data so that it makes the actual encryption more effective; it makes data encrypted by the same key have different values." If you had asked me how...
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Fantasy TechEd Day 5
You may be womdering what happened to Day 4... (honestly, I had nothing cool to say)
I was busy installing Vs.Net Beta 2 on my laptop (I know most of you did this weeks go)... I decided to be brave and install it without VirtualPC. I have held off because of vs 2003 projects I'm doing (any ideas whose project, Dave). After jokingly advising another friend that the solution to his weird vs.net 2003 glitch was to install whidbey and target projects at .Net 1.1 I decided I could do the same (so I did). [Unfortunately, as an astute reader pointed out......
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Fantasy TechEd Day 3 - On conferences like this...
You know this fantasy conference has not been as good as the Sells XML Conference. I hope he has another one of those soon; I'll sign up ASAP this time.
Seriously it appears that Darrell is having a good time. I still wish I was there (basically nothing cool or funny to say today.. I'm working! Dang it! Besides like Brendan, Sahil, and Mike Gunderloy -- my new boss for the writing gig, I'm too cheap to go to an expensive conference).
Maybe my good buddies Dave and Eric will put on the Ohio Dev Con! We could grill at Dave's house and have...
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TechEd Day 2 (of my fantasy TechEd)
<pure_fiction reason="I'm not at TechEd">I imagine that after a long night, I would just be getting to the conference right now... A long night with Don and Melissa Demsak (in my mind she's really nice... since I've never met her, I really don't know) and whoever else is hanging with them. After they went to bed, I hooked up with Rory to chat about his mind altering post (BTW, this ended with Rory being pissed at my close-mindedness... sorry Rory... wait I don't need to say I'm sorry! First I wasn't there; second I don't have free will <grin />)
I did (would...
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TechEd Day 1 - Nope I didn't make it...
I decided to blog about my non-experiences at TechEd 2005. I didn't get to go... It sold out before I could get all my paperwork at work to go through. Right now I would be experiencing the Key-note. I think this was going to be delivered by Steve Balmer (since I couldn't go I lost interest in seeing what all was going on).
I would probably be hanging out with Darrell and DonXML, and probably would have a couple chats with Rory Blythe and Scott Hanselman (Ok, maybe not Scott since he really doesn't know me).
If you didn't go because...
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The Database war...
I've been thinking about a number of things lately as I look at a number of technologies. I think there's a growing programmer's revolt against the DBAs. Maybe I'm crazy, but it sure seems like that is what is happening (and no I'm not talking about Frans' comment or my response in another blog entry).
I'm looking at the whole O/R Mapper thing, the object persistence stuff, and the OODB stuff and I think I see a trend. Are developer's rebelling against the relational database? Has the traditional relational database run it's time and is it over (because it's not...
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Pondering UI Mappers...
I've done a bit of reading over the last couple days. DonXML mentioned Domain Driven Design (DDD) in a comment. This led me to a series of posts from Steve Eichert on DDD. This post of Steve's was very intriguing to me. He talks about the need for UI Mappers and how they could potentially make life easier.
Now you all know that I am not a fan of OR mappers. Actually that's not totally true. My issue is really with some of the dynamic ones that build their own dynamic SQL, etc. Sorry, I guess I'm a control freak... I want to know...