ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

I see a great many projects start off on the wrong foot by trying to decide all of their implementation technologies at the beginning of a project. Usually there’s a project kick-off meeting where everyone flies in from various locations to get introduced to all of the players and decide on things like what database engine are we going to use? What technology will we use to handle our data access? What user interface technologies should we use? Should we use web services?

Delegates are ubiquitous throughout .NET development though many developers are not aware of their full range. This stems from the fact that few books or articles do a good job tying together all ways in which delegates may be used. Additionally there are often misconceptions over delegate semantics - how to construct a delegate within a given context. This post seeks to clarify the muddy water around delegates by use of demonstrative tests. Each test is explicitly named for the semantic it demonstrates and internally each test asserts expected behavior. As the title implies, this post is not intended as an introduction to delegates. If you are looking for such material Juval Lowy does a decent job here.

Imagine the following interview with two interviewees, “Player A” and “Player B”:

Interviewer: “Okay, sir. Let’s say a ball is hit a little bit to your left. How do you field it?”

Player A: “Well, I’d take a few steps to the left and try to get my body in front of the ball. I’d use my left-hand to field the ball, switch the ball over to my right hand, and throw it to first.”

Player B: “I’d take a few steps to the left, keeping my body bent at the knees and the back so I could respond to any strange hops the ball might take. If I can get completely in front of the ball, comfortably, I will, but I might have to field it with one hand to the left of my body, if I can’t get my body in front of it. Depending on the direction I’m moving, the time it took me to get to the ball, and whether I got completely in front of it or not, I might have to throw it on the run.”

Based upon the two player’s answers to this question, Player B gets hired.

This might seem like the right call. The problem is that Player B is a recent college grad that majored in English and played intramural ball. Player A is Derek Jeter (Yankees shortstop) before he was really known as the Derek Jeter.

What if you were the interviewer and you had made this decision? You would’ve just altered the entire course of your team. There’s a good chance that from this decision forward you’d be losing a lot of games to the team that hired the person you let pass by.

Good Lord. After much gnashing of teeth I finally got my notebook configured to use three external monitors. Why is this so hard in this day and age? Am I the first person in the world that wants to run more than two monitors from a notebook? Why aren't all notebook manufacturers providing the hardware to get this done easily? I could see if I owned a standard notebook that isn't built for a professional computer user, but I own a Dell M90 notebook that is built for a hardcore geek.

Anyway, enough venting. On to the details...

Windows Vista introduces several security improvements paving the way for limited user account operation versus the de facto practice of privileged user account operation. In this post we look at what the two modes of operation mean to a developer and how to do some common tasks under LUA operation.

Subversion supports repository access over an SSH tunnel. That is good news because the first "S" in SSH stands for secure. So the next question is how do we configure Subversion to use SSH?

I would like to access SVN over web to a remote server. Can you send some information whether to use SSH or Apache over web?

On any given project, we typically have a ThirdParty directory where we house all our third-party assemblies that we reference. Inside of that directory we create directories representing each assembly or set of assemblies. For instance, we usually have a ThirdParty directory that contains a directory for each NUnit version we've used on the project at any given time. If we were to start a project today, we'd have a ThirdParty directory that contains an NUnit-2.4.2-net-2.0 directory (since that is the latest NUnit version).

Over the last few days I’ve been working on a high priority performance issue for a client. This issue arose not long after they started using the .NET 2.0 framework, and it was a big enough issue to delay an impending release to clients. I was told that when certain elements on the screen were refreshed by clicking a “Refresh” button, that the performance of the application paired with .NET 2.0 was not acceptable—although it was when paired with .NET 1.1. I was also told the bottleneck occurred in the DataSet.Merge method.

I'm currently working on a project that contains C# as well as VB.NET. 95% of my time is spent with C#, fortunately, since that is my strength, but since I do have to foray into VB and since I'm in love with Resharper, I downloaded the official release of Resharper 3.0 today and tried it out. Along with the VB.NET support it now has, I was interested in seeing any other cool features they've added to it.