Exploration of Thought

Sometimes it feels like you've been hit by a car, sometimes it feels like a freight train. Either way, if you're in this industry and you're not ready for change or if you're not crazy enough to "know  you can figure it out" then its time to get out... Why? .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio…

I was having a discussion with a colleague last week and we got on the topic of unit testing. What unfolded is what stemmed this post... It started like this... Colleague: "There is no need to test getter's and setter's in a property, because 'I know they work'." Me: "WHOA WHOA WHOA!! You know they…

I'm working on a presentation for the Twin Cities Code Camp and I've upgraded some old samples that Microsoft provided for the new version of .NET 3.5. Upon doing so I imagined the question coming up during the presentation "Well, can we use LINQ in the rule set editor"? Good question.   And here's the…

This is a quick note to those of you who are trying to access the External RuleSet Toolkit Sample in this download on MSDN. The .NET 3.5 External RuleSet Toolkit sample is a Workflow Rules Engine Sample that shows you how to externalize the Workflow's Rule engine for your own evil, errr, I mean good.…

I ran into a problem today.... I wanted to install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 on my virtual pc instance today. I started the install and got an error stating I did not have enough space on my drive to do so. I was about a gig short. This is on a VPC too... NO…

Jason Bock posted this awhile back - but I thought I'd post it for my subscribers. It's been hectic with a new kiddo and all kinds of stuff going on so I'm just getting around to posting this now.   I have joined ...   Background info: I recently moved to Minneapolis to explore other…

Unit Testing Purpose: To test an individual unit of code to ensure that it is working properly. This is where the most confusion lies, so I'm going to focus the majority of the beginning series on this area. Possibly to the effect of a few posts. Normally you'll hear a developer say "I have unit…

Over the next few weeks I'm going to cover some topics will help alleviate the pain of understanding the difference between different tests in application development. The series will consist of the following articles: Unit Tests - Its not what most of you think. Integration Tests (in progress) Functional/Acceptance Tests (in progress) Regression Tests (in…

This may look like a repeat... well.. because it is... BUT.. you cannot find the old post. Why? Because, well ... it no longer exists. My old host decided to accidentally delete my account. Yeah. Oops. After that nightmare, I've moved to a new host where the grass is greener, the hippies wear deodorant and…

Be Prepared - A Practical Handbook For New Dads Being a new dad is sort of like anything else in life that you've never done before. Its confusing, its hard, its fun, its rewarding and well, its just plain hard to figure out. Babies are like computer viruses that always adapt. You have to figure…

The data backing this up is purely from reading on the web and just following a "gut" feeling. Just from following people on Twitter you can see how much hype this thing is getting. Check it out. This is how I see 2009 panning out for our browser market:   Notes:I'm not trying to offend anyone…

It never fails... I'll boot up, start a program, walk away, log back into my PC and all of a sudden the disk light on my laptop or desktop is lit up like a Christmas tree for the next 10 minutes. The computer is rendered useless until its done "working". I can't do anything at…