I _Really_ Don't Know

Pat Helland performs a nice little ditty that unfortunately I missed as I didn't get to TechEd this year, but it's well worth the download... http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=11950

Worse is Better by Richard Gabriel

The paper above is old news for many people, but in my continued search for 'better' ways to build 'better' software I only just came across this paper. In many ways this can relate to Agile methodologies in which delivering value as soon as possible is key to the success of the project. XP uses short iterations, SCRUM uses sprints, although there are some big differences in the way these two work.

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, but the blind man shouting "I can see, I can see" will also gather many followers.

I just came across this great article talking about user-centred design in agile processes.

I wrote something along the same lines last year, but it's always worth re-visiting and very good to hear others talking about the same issues.

So, I thought I'd re-visit it.

Often when writing NUnit tests I find myself wanting to output some stuff to the Console in order to make sense of a failing test. But, you don't want the console window filling up with rubbish when the test is passing, so instead of doing this...

We've just been having a discussion at work about the benefits of Impersonation and Delegation in .Net. That is, the ability of an application to perform actions using the identity of the human user driving them.

For web applications, web services, database access etc this can be very useful, giving a trail throughout a multi-tier application showing which user performed an action.

The obvious perception is that this is, of course, more secure. But that's just not true...

"...and they don't even comment their code..." said Brian as he explained noisily why the project he was code reviewing was poor enough to get someone fired.

"But comments are evil" I said, defending code that was not mine and I had never seen. "Comments are an excuse for writing unreadable code that nobody other than the writer can understand ... and they go out-of-date quicker than you can say 'jack robinson' so you can't trust them even if they're there."

Joel On Software, Coder to Developer

Must... not... buy... more... books...

I always enjoy mind puzzles like The Monty Hall Problem which I discovered recently while reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Many of my friends like these puzzles too. Yes, I am a geek.

But one of the obvious ones I've always thought I knew, as it's easy, I've just found out I got wrong...

Generating an Excel file from .Net should be easy right? MS have good reason to have you using their formats as the de-facto standard and make it easy, huh.

Nope. Not really.

It's a bit trickier than you might think.