Browsing Posts in .NET General

I don’t have to remind everyone that we’re in the middle of a world-wide economic depression downturn. When the economy is good, it is hard enough to convince your boss to re-build an application from scratch. When the economy is bad, it is bloody near impossible. In the coming months (and potentially years), I expect […]

Joey Devilla (aka The Accordian Guy) from Microsoft’s Toronto office started Coffee and Code a few weeks ago in Toronto and John Bristowe is bringing the experience to Calgary. When John contacted me about the event, I thought to myself, “I like coffee. I like code. I want to be involved!” (Heck, I would order […]

A friend, having recently upgraded to Rhino Mocks 3.5, expressed his confusion regarding when to use mocks vs. stubs. He had read Martin Fowler’s Mocks Aren’t Stubs (recommended), but was still confused with how to actually decide whether to use a mock or a stub in practice. (For a pictorial overview, check out Jeff Atwood […]

My first dnrTV episode went live today. I am talking with Carl Franklin about dependency inversion, dependency injection, and inversion of control. I demonstrate how to build a very simple IoC container. My intent is to show developers that it isn’t any thing crazy scary. I talk about how IoC facilitates decoupling dependencies and creating […]

I’ll be one of the speakers at the Calgary .NET User Group this Thursday. First up is Daryl Rasmussem… Building ASP.NET/AJAX with Visual Studio 2008 by Daryl Rasmussem AJAX is now built into ASP.NET with Visual Studio 2008 – and because there’s no separate download to install, the fully integrated nature of AJAX gives you […]

This morning I was getting ready to record a screencast about ReSharper 4 EAP. To make it easier for people to follow along, I launched Roy Osherove’s excellent utility, Keyboard Jedi. Rather than the expected result, this friendly dialog box greeted me: Living La Vida x64 My main development machine is running Vista x64. I’ve […]

During my geekSpeak screencast last week, one of the attendees asked: Any recommendations for refactoring existing code to insert interfaces? (e.g., what’s the best dependency to break first, the database?) Excellent question! Most of us do not have the luxury of working on greenfield projects, but instead work on brownfield projects – existing applications that […]

Today at lunch* I’ll be joining Glen Gordon and Lynn Langit on geekSpeak to talk about Taming Your Software Dependencies. Specifically I’ll be talking about moving from tightly-coupled to loosely-coupled architectures using dependency inversion, dependency injection, and inversion of control containers. geekSpeak is an interactive LiveMeeting driven by audience questions with no PowerPoint and lots […]

My latest article just hit the web in the March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine. Loosen Up: Tame Your Software Dependencies for More Flexible Apps takes you on a journey from a highly-coupled architecture, which we’re all familiar with, to gradually more loosely-coupled ones. First stop is the problems inherent in highly-coupled applications. To start […]

As promised, Microsoft has made the source for the .NET Framework available for debugging purposes. You’ll need to be running Visual Studio 2008 and install this QFE (aka patch). Full instructions for how to enable .NET Framework source debugging can be found on Shawn Burke’s blog here. You can also read Scott Guthrie’s announcement here. […]