Christmas came a bit early for my team this year when we were told that the company had purchased licenses for both Reflector AND ReSharper! Naturally I installed both right away. Of course we’re all familiar with Reflector but haven’t used it lately since it’s no longer free. ReSharper on the other hand is new to many of us. I know lots of great developers that swear by it but I’ve never really had a chance to dive in and try it out. I generally think I’m pretty savvy with C# syntax but after just two days ReSharper has already taught me a few syntax tricks that I’ve adopted.
Milestone Reached!
I’ve been somewhat serious about keeping this site fresh since about March of 2010. Although I don’t post as frequently as I’d like I’ve still managed to write over 100 articles covering a variety of topics like LINQ, the Task Parallel Library, Visual Studio, Team Foundation System, Mercurial, Windows Phone, and many more.
Today this site reached a milestone of sorts when it passed 25,000 views! I realize that views aren’t everything but I’m humbled to know that people from around the world are finding it. Of course not all of the traffic is from real people but I’d like to thank the ones who are. I hope that if you’ve found this site that you’ve also found it useful.
I have some ideas for my next several posts but if you have anything you’re interested in and you’d like to see me cover please feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments. I’d like to hear your ideas too!
Filed under Community
Archiving with Mercurial
Recently I’ve been working with a third party component vendor to resolve a defect. They requested that I create a sample project illustrating the issue and send it to them as a zip archive. Building the project was easy but I didn’t want to send all of the extra stuff that goes along with it. In other words, I wanted a snapshot of the current revision but without the source control bindings. I knew how to do this with Subversion but how did Mercurial handle it?
Filed under Mercurial, Software Development, Tools & Utilities, Version Control
More Fiddler Troubles
Last week I posted about a coworker having some trouble with Fiddler. Whenever he’d visit a page the only thing that Fiddler would show was oscex-en.url.trendmicro.com. At the time I thought it was a problem our virus scanner setting itself as a proxy and interfering with the process filters. He actually wasn’t using filters so that wasn’t the problem.
Earlier this week another coworker stopped by my cube and said he’d heard rumor about me troubleshooting some fiddler issues… And he had his laptop… Uh oh…
Filed under Fiddler, Software Development, Tools & Utilities
[AgileIndy] Effective Retrospectives
Early last week my wife and I had an exchange that went something like this:
Esther: Did you know that AgileIndy is meeting on Tuesday evening?
Me: [blank stare]
Me: [silence]
Me: I didn’t know there was an AgileIndy!
Naturally I was a bit surprised (and proud) that she knew about a local software development group that I’d never heard of so i asked how she found out about it. It turns out that she had been looking for some local events on Meetup and AgileIndy was one of the featured groups.
This “discovery” was very timely since I’m transitioning to a new team that’s going to be more agile than our teams have traditionally been. Despite having read a few books and attending a few events like Cincinnati Day of Agile I’m still very new to it so I hopped onto the site, found their page and after reading a bit about it I decided I should go.
Filed under AgileIndy, Community, Software Development, User Groups
My Standard .hgignore File
Since I started using Mercurial a few months ago I’ve fallen in love with it. There was a bit of a learning curve for getting up and running but I found that the Tortoise tools are really intuitive and eliminated some of the pain. Most importantly though, Mercurial addresses the single biggest problem I had when working away from home – no repository access.
Filed under Mercurial, Practices, Software Development, Version Control
Fiddler Troubles
This morning I was included on an email asking a few of us if we’ve been able to use Fiddler. He said when he tried to use it he saw it do its update check then make a request to oscex-en.url.trendmicro.com but it wouldn’t capture anything else regardless of which sites he visited.
I’ve been using Fiddler a lot lately to help test a new RESTful WCF service I’m prototyping and hadn’t been having any trouble with it but then I remembered that I didn’t have filters enabled. I clicked over to the Filters tab and checked the “Show only Internet Explorer” traffic, refreshed a page, then nothing… Fiddler wasn’t capturing anything. What gives? This worked the last time I used it.
Filed under Fiddler, Software Development, Tools & Utilities
I Survived My First GiveCamp!
I did it! I made it through my first GiveCamp! For the benefit of those not familiar with GiveCamp it’s a weekend-long event where technologists donate their time to provide software solutions to non-profit organizations that otherwise could not afford them.
When we say “weekend-long” we mean it. This was a caffeine-fueled 48 hour marathon of requirements gathering, design, code, CSS, collaboration, and stand-ups. The only thing missing was sleep! The lack of sleep was a small price to pay though to see how our work was going to breathe new life into these organizations.
System.Diagnostics.Debugger
I hardly ever use the classes in the System.Diagnostics namespace. As much as I’d like everyone to believe that it’s because I’m such a rockstar that I don’t need them, it’s really just that I generally use other techniques. With Visual Studio providing so many tools for debugging I’ve rarely had reason to dig into this namespace much. Sure, I’ve used the Debug, Trace, and EventLog classes but I haven’t taken the time to investigate what else is in there.
Filed under .NET, C#, Software Development
Cast or GetHashCode?
I really hate to resurrect this issue but after some recent conversations I think it’s necessary. We have a lot of code – particularly in the deep, dark recesses of our application that no one dares touch – that uses GetHashCode() to retrieve the underlying value of an enumeration item.
I’ve been slowly working to eliminate this technique from the system but it works, has been in use for eight or so years, and old habits die hard. An unfortunate side effect though, is that less experienced developers see this pattern repeated throughout the code, internalize the practice, and propagate it. If GetHashCode() works why should we care?
Filed under .NET, C#, Software Development
