Recently I was asked to give a small talk about what I think it takes to coach effectively, and want to share those thoughts here. Effective January 1, I was promoted to Software Engineering Manag...

In the project discussed in the previous post, I have a configuration class that can be instantiated directly and populated with configuration information. Alternatively, I wanted to have the clas...

During a recent project, I made a very committed effort to implement this project using strict TDD practices. I ended up with a simpler design than originally expected based on those tests, which m...

Recently, I developed a website for a client using ASP.NET 2.0, along with the fantastic MonoRail framework. I’ll be posting more on MonoRail in the future, but to put it in a nutshell, Monorail is...

We develop ASP.NET applications in our environment that may or may not be run on a clustered environment. As part of this clustered environment, we have session state set to SqlServer in the web.co...

Yesterday, at work, we had a very lively discussion about refactoring. I took a few things away from that discussion and thought I would address these in this particular entry. First, I believe th...

A few weeks ago, I talked about TDD bliss and showed some live templates that I had created for Resharper to relieve some of the more mundane parts of writing unit tests. The original version of t...

We have an application that given certain inputs can take quite a while to run. The previous solution that we had in place to let the user know what was going on was a popup window that went away a...

For the past two years, I’ve been doing all of my development work inside Virtual PC images, and have found that this suits me very well. I like the keeping my development environment isolated from...

Recently, I was pointed to an article at Fast Company that cites some research that seems to debunk six common myths of creativity. If we look at some of these myths, we can see how they relate to...