So I’ve encountered this specific test case, which is quite elaborate. What do you mean by that? Well, it contains a lot of code, and also looks more difficult to understand c...
Read more ...The quality of software, or any product, can be viewed from different perspectives. This is because there are usually multiple stakeholders, each bringing their own unique view...
Read more ...Today I got reminded of a great video of GeePaw Hill about the “Five Underplayed Premises Of TDD” . 1. The money premise: When writing tests, we don’t do it for the art of it...
Read more ...This is the final installment of a three-part series about contract tests. In the first blog post we’ve discussed the rationale behind contract tests. Next we’ve looked at how ...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, we’ve discussed the rationale behind contract tests. They are used for exercising those parts of an application that communicate with other parts of ...
Read more ...One of my favorite awesome talks of all time is Integrated Tests Are a Scam by J.B. Rainsberger. I must admit that the title has a clickbait vibe to it. However, I very muc...
Read more ...Back in 2003, Brian Marick wrote an excellent article series about agile testing. There he described the concept of the Testing Quadrant. To my recollection this used to be a ...
Read more ...I’ve heard that you’ve been working on this new feature for the payroll system based on the newly voted government legislation? Yes, I am. How is it going? Seems like a major...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, we discussed how to use Approval Tests for verifying generated PDF documents. In this blog post I’m going to show how to extend the Approval Test li...
Read more ...A while back I was confronted with a part of a legacy system that generates PDF documents. This legacy system used a well known library for generating the requested PDF files. ...
Read more ...Most test frameworks out there have the capability to disable tests. This is usually done by adding some kind of annotation that instructs the test runner to ignore an individu...
Read more ...I’m very happy to announce that Writing Maintainable Unit Tests is also available as a paper book. Both the ebook and the paper book have been completely self-published. I must...
Read more ...Do you have 15 minutes to spare? Sure, what can I do for you? Well, you know I’ve been working on that new feature we were discussing at the whiteboard last week. I’ve finishe...
Read more ...I’m very happy to announce that I’ve finished writing my first book Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. What an amazing journey it has been. I would never have thought that I woul...
Read more ...Using inheritance for test classes is not a desirable thing as it introduces a number of issues. An abstract base class quite often originates from the desire to share and reus...
Read more ...Once in a while I get asked the question whether one should write solitary tests for logging functionality. My answer to this question is the typical consultant answer: “It dep...
Read more ...Previously we discussed why solitary tests should be easy to read. Sometimes, the readability of solitary tests is affected by those developers who overcomplicate or overenginee...
Read more ...Occasionally someone asks me the question whether it’s necessary to test the code of solitary tests? Usually this question is ushered by folks who are opposed to the idea of au...
Read more ...So I noticed that you completed that feature that we’ve been pair programming yesterday? Yes, I was a little bored yesterday evening. So I decided to continue working on it Gr...
Read more ...Solitary tests never cross the process boundary in which they are executed. This means that a solitary test never executes code that talks to a database, communicates across the...
Read more ...I’m very happy to announce that the first draft of my book Writing Maintainable Unit Tests has been published on LeanPub. It’s the written counterpart of my video course, with ...
Read more ...One of the most commonly asked questions in developer communities regarding Test-Driven Development and unit testing is whether one should write unit tests for private methods,...
Read more ...Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for about two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about avoiding excessive specification of test doubles. This is just one in a series of “good practices” for using test doubles in solit...
Read more ...Previously we’ve discussed the different kinds of test doubles. By using test doubles in our solitary tests, we also introduce more coupling between the test code and the imple...
Read more ...When stating the definition of a solitary test, we mentioned that they have two constraints: The code being exercised by these tests never cross the process boundary in whic...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about indirect inputs and outputs when a unit test exercises a Subject Under Test. The examples shown previously demonstrate the use of ...
Read more ...Previously we discussed what state and behaviour verification is about. Depending on the nature of the production code that we’re designing, we might decide to apply one approa...
Read more ...When reasoning about types of automated tests, I find it quite useful to reason about two different categories, namely solitary and sociable tests. Also see the test pyramid fo...
Read more ...In a previous blog post, we discussed the test pyramid and why it is a useful model to reason about a healthy mix of solitary and sociable tests. I mentioned that at t...
Read more ...Previously, we touched on two different categories of automated tests, namely solitary and sociable tests. Also we discussed how and why the test pyramid is a useful model to ...
Read more ...Last week I published my very first video course titled Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. It surely has been a very learnful experience. Going through the process of creating th...
Read more ...I’m very proud to announce that my first video course has been published on Udemy. This course teaches software developers how to write maintainable and readable unit tests. It...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, we touched on two different categories of automated tests, namely solitary and sociable tests. We also mentioned that in order to build maintainable ...
Read more ...It’s more than fair to say that the terminology used in the world of automated tests can be a bit overwhelming. Software people have uncovered all sorts of tests in a wide vari...
Read more ...Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for almost two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...
Read more ...Developers are lazy. There’s nothing new about that. We even pride ourselves on it. Sometimes being lazy is a good thing, but most of the time it’s not something we should brag ...
Read more ...A while back I stumbled upon this talk titled Built-in Fake Objects. After I’ve watched the first 20 minutes or so, I was so worked up that I almost threw away my iPad just out ...
Read more ...People who know me personally know that I like to go for a long run on a regular basis. I sit and work at a desk all day. So as part of the work I do, labouring the codes, I go ...
Read more ...A while back, I was doing a code review. At some point I encountered some constructs that I see quite often. While I was describing and building my case, I was thinking that I ...
Read more ...One of the most fascinating documents I’ve read to date is the memo from Roger Boisjoly on O-Ring Erosion. The original target audience for this memo he’d written were the manag...
Read more ...Back in 2008, Jeremy Miller introduced the Thunderdome Principle, a technique he used for building maintainable ASP.NET MVC applications which later led to the FubuMVC open-sour...
Read more ...One of the first issues I faced when learning F# was finding out how to specify multiple parameters to a function. While this might sound obvious when learning a functional prog...
Read more ...I’ve been removing a couple of dead features this week. You know, those features that senior people in organisations like to tell epic war stories about. Those mighty conversati...
Read more ...A software development team in an organization should be able to focus on the core domain that reflects the business it’s serving. Developers on the team should be able to itera...
Read more ...The first time I read the GoF book, I didn’t understand it. This was because I didn’t had a decent understanding of the principles of object-oriented programming at the time. A...
Read more ...When I started blogging back in 2005 I created my personal blog on Blogger. I’ve been using this excellent blogging service over the years, enjoying the luxuries of not having t...
Read more ...I’ve been learning about functional programming for quite some time now, trying to wrap my head around the various concepts that this paradigm has to offer. One of the languages...
Read more ...Some time ago, I was talking to a colleague of mine at a company event. While we were there talking, one of us popped the following question: What's the latest totally cra...
Read more ...A while ago I read "Out of the tar pit", which is an excellent paper written by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks. In this paper, the authors discuss different types of complexity in ...
Read more ...I’m still in the process of trying to wrap my head around Clojure. I’ve been practicing several different katas like Fizz Buzz and the Bowling Game. Another one I’ve been doing ...
Read more ...There are a lot of screencasts, recordings of user group gatherings and conference talks available online. I try to commit myself watching at least two new talks every week, and...
Read more ...As mentioned in the previous blog post, I’ve been learning Clojure and I decided to do so while practicing a couple of coding katas. The second kata that I want to walk throug...
Read more ...I’ve been learning more about the ins and outs of Clojure lately, so I decided to practice a couple of katas. The obvious first one is the Fizz Buzz kata. Here’s the code of m...
Read more ...Anyone learning about DDD, CQRS and/or event sourcing has probably read the source code of Greg Young’s simple CQRS example at some point or another. This is one of the simplest...
Read more ...Some time ago, I was watching this excellent video course by Neal Ford titled “Functional Thinking – Functional Programming using Java, Clojure and Scala”. In one of the modules...
Read more ...I was implementing a custom writable stream in Node.js the other day when I ran into this issue where I wanted to know whether more data was coming or that we were actually done...
Read more ...Soon after I started using Node.js, I ran into the phenomenon of multiple nested callbacks that create some kind of horizontal tower effect. The solution I came up with in order...
Read more ...Earlier this week I accidentally stumbled on archive.org where they are hosting an extensive backlog of old issues of Byte magazine. This magazine was an American microcomputer ...
Read more ...A while ago, I was thinking about which programming language I wanted to learn next. At first I was doubting between Scala, Ruby or perhaps Clojure. But I couldn’t reall...
Read more ...I’ve been following the ScriptCS project with great interest over the last couple of months. As you may know by now, I’ve been searching for a more lightweight .NET development ...
Read more ...Some time ago I was looking for a validation library/module for use in a small Express application that I was writing at the time. I couldn’t find anything that suited my taste ...
Read more ...Inheritance in JavaScript has been the topic of many discussions in the past and will continue to be the source of future debates and arguments. While we do value composition ov...
Read more ...It’s true. I’m a Sublime Text addict. It’s by far my favorite development tool. End of story! Just to illustrate, earlier this week, a member of our development team asked how t...
Read more ...Earlier this week, I read this great article titled “Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript” by Addy Osmani. This is a highly recommended read for anyone involved in writing ...
Read more ...Last year I wrote this blog post where I described a couple of ways on how to tackle routing with Express. In the mean while I moved on from the “Plain Old School” approach to a...
Read more ...I noticed this blog post from Scott Hanselman the other day about Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop. This post included a screenshot from the installation program. ...
Read more ...At first I was a bit skeptical whether I should spend time listening to the audio version of this book. I’ve heard and read both great things as well as bad things about the boo...
Read more ...The last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with a load testing tool called Blitz. You can create a free account which provides you the ability to ‘rush’ your web application wit...
Read more ...A couple of weeks ago, I digested the audio version of Outliers – The Story of Success, written by Malcolm Gladwell. In this book, the author tells the story of ...
Read more ...In the previous blog posts I discussed the importance of getting enough sleep and physical exercise. For this post I want to provide a quick shout out of the social media diet t...
Read more ...In the previous blog post, I discussed the importance of getting enough sleep every single night. For this post I want to emphasize the importance of physical exercise. I’m writ...
Read more ...When I was reading Just for Fun, I came across this paragraph in the book where Linus Torvalds stated that he never missed a good night’s sleep during the early days when he was...
Read more ...Recently I added Twitter authentication to TrackMyRun using a library called Passport. I was pretty impressed how smooth this all went as I completely neglected all security con...
Read more ...In the previous post I wrote about my personal routing flavor for Express. For this post, I want to briefly discuss how to set up error handling using Express. In order to get u...
Read more ...A few of weeks ago, I ran into this awesome article “Understanding process.nextTick()” on the How To Node blog. In this article, the ever friendly Kishore Nallan shows a couple ...
Read more ...Earlier this week, I ran across this incredibly helpful utility called npm-police. It analyzes all packages that are specified in a package.json file and reports which packages ...
Read more ...A while ago, my colleague Wouter recommended this book titled Just for Fun – The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary written by Linus Torvalds. The author ...
Read more ...A couple of weeks ago I finished reading The Unix Programming Environment, written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike. The main reason that I picked up t...
Read more ...A couple of weeks ago I learned about a very neat feature of CouchDB called view collations. Basically, view collations enables us to make joins between documents. Let’s look at...
Read more ...I’ve been working on a small pet project for a couple of weeks now, which I named TrackMyRun. I’m quite fanatic when it comes to running, doing about 130 runs a year. Currently ...
Read more ...In the previous post I provided a short introduction to Express, a web development framework built on top of connect that is heavily inspired by Sinatra. For this post we’ll div...
Read more ...Yep, that time of the year again. Shiny new calendars and the accompanying festivities are upon us again. I can’t get rid of the feeling that every year passes by a lot faster t...
Read more ...< The list of previous installments can be found here. > There are several frameworks out there for building web applications with Node.js, one being more successful than ...
Read more ...< The list of previous installments can be found here. > I just wanted to share a very neat feature of npm that makes life quite a lot easier when developing libraries for...
Read more ...< The list of previous installments can be found here. > In a previous blog post, I already wrote about BDD style unit tests for testing Node.js modules using Jasmine. I r...
Read more ...A couple of weeks ago, I ran into this website from Eric S. Raymond, the author of the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. There’s a recording of a great presentation...
Read more ...In a couple of weeks, I’ll be doing an introductory presentation on Node.js at the Agile.NET 2011 conference. While having a look at the other sessions and speakers, I’m quite h...
Read more ...To me, developers that are not applying TDD practices during their day-to-day job always seem more in a hurry than developers that do apply red-green-refactor. In their hurry, t...
Read more ...Earlier this week I finished reading Uncle Bob’s latest book The Clean Coder. Robert C. Martin is a great writer and I very much enjoyed reading his previous boo...
Read more ...While catching up on my reading backlog, I particularly enjoyed reading two new books I bought recently which I’m going to briefly discuss in this blog post. 1....
Read more ...Earlier this week, I ran into an issue while using the dynamic keyword in C#. I learned from C# in Depth that there are a couple of restrictions with dynamic, most notably when ...
Read more ...For the final blog post in this series, we’re going to go over a couple of cool little nuggets that one can use to write some elegant CoffeeScript code. Also check out the previ...
Read more ...I’ve been using E-TextEditor for more than a year now for doing all my JavaScript, Node.js and CoffeeScript development. You can think of E-TextEditor as ...
Read more ...For this blog post, we’re going to discuss ranges, loops and comprehensions in CoffeeScript. Also check out the previous installments: And Then There Was Coffee Variables an...
Read more ...For this blog post, we’re going to continue our journey through the wonderful world of CoffeeScript, exploring objects and classes. Also make sure to check out the previous inst...
Read more ...For this blog post we’re going to continue where we previously left off, talking a bit more about functions in CoffeeScript. Let’s get things started by talking a bit about func...
Read more ...< The list of previous installments can be found here. > The basic premise of Node.js is that all I/O operations are expensive. That is why all I/O should be carried out a...
Read more ...As I mentioned in the previous blog post, CoffeeScript is a neat little language that compiles down to JavaScript code. Its syntax is heavily inspired by Ruby and next to bringi...
Read more ...Last week, I finished reading Hands-on Node.js written by Pedro Teixeira. I very much enjoyed reading this concise introduction to Node.js, and although it’s targeted towards be...
Read more ...Those of you who have been reading this blog lately know that I’m quite enthusiastic when it comes to JavaScript. As the common behavioral language of the web, JavaScript has be...
Read more ...The recording of my very first E-VAN talk on Node.js is now available. If you want to hear me blabbering on about Node.js then I suggest you have a look.
Read more ...Since a couple of months or so, the amount of time spent for my daily commute to and from work nearly tripled. I also decided to travel by train instead of using my car ...
Read more ...< The list of previous installments can be found here. > Isaac recently released version 1.0 of npm, which is a package manager for Node.js. I’ve been using npm very early...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modul...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modul...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modul...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modul...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modu...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...I really learned a lot from reading the first edition of C# in Depth, so I was very glad that I finally found some time to make my way through the second edi...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modu...
Read more ...My very first encounter with a version control system was CVS. I’ve used this tool for many years (late 90’s, early 2000’s), learning a lot of best practices about source contro...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modu...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...I already finished “Driving Technical Change” a few weeks ago, but I got so caught up with other stuff that I almost forgot to actually sit down and write a review for ...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modul...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Propert...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector CommonJS and Creating Custom Modu...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Debugging with node-inspector In a previous blog post, I already...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Propert...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...Last week I finished reading the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained, written by Kent Beck. I explicitly wanted to read the first edition, that I purc...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion In this post, I...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Introduction Threads vs. Events Using Non-Standard Modules Writing unit tests for your code drastically reduces the am...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting For this post, I’m going to discuss a feature...
Read more ...Over the weekend I watched this movie called The Social Network. As a geek, I felt that I was somehow mentally obligated to see this movie :-). While I was watching this movie, ...
Read more ...Earlier this week I finished reading JavaScript Patterns, written by Stoyan Stefanov. After I very much enjoyed reading his previous book titled Object-Oriented ...
Read more ...Around the same time last year, I wrote this blog post where I’ve set out a couple of things to learn throughout the year. Being really honest with myself, I must admit that I c...
Read more ...Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions I just wanted to quickly share a little tidbit that I r...
Read more ...As this is already the fourth blog post using the “Basic JavaScript” theme, I guess we’re slowly getting a small blog series on our hands. Here are the links to the previous ins...
Read more ...I just want to get something of my chest that is bothering me for quite some time now. It’s not going to be a rant of some sort, but merely a couple of observations for ...
Read more ...In previous blog posts, I provided a short introduction to Node.js while also discussing the event-based model that lies at its core. For this blog post, I want to show how to e...
Read more ...I made a classic rookie mistake with ASP.NET (MVC) the other day. In my spare time, I’m working on this small sample application for myself in order to learn more about ASP.NET ...
Read more ...I’ve been working for an enterprise corporation for 5+ years, which I’m going to be leaving soon. This organization is suffering from a wide-spread malady called “meetingiti...
Read more ...In previous blog posts, I talked about the rich capabilities of functions and objects in JavaScript. For this post I want to briefly touch on the concept of prototypes. Having a...
Read more ...I just want to quickly point out a tool that I’ve been playing with for a couple of days now, named AutoTest.NET. Its an open-source tool that originates from a popular tool in ...
Read more ...Just before I recently decided to turn a new page in my professional career, I came across this book called The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the ...
Read more ...In a previous blog post, I provided a shallow introduction to Node.js. I also mentioned where you can find more information on how to get it installed on Windows as well as how ...
Read more ...Last week I finally managed to hunt down and resolve a bug that I had been chasing for quite some time. A couple of years ago I built an ASP.NET web service that makes use of a ...
Read more ...In a previous blog post, I showed some of the rich capabilities of functions in JavaScript. For this post I want to have a brief look at objects in JavaScript. Let’s start with ...
Read more ...Like myself, you might have read an article somewhere about Node.js or heard it mentioned a couple of times during some talk. So I actually got curious and decided to start lear...
Read more ...Last Saturday I got up very early in the morning so I could spend the whole day at the Code Retreat in Ghent. This Code Retreat was organized by AGILEMinds and facilitated by Co...
Read more ...Yesterday, I attended ArrrrCamp in Gent together with my former colleague Peter Eysermans. This was my very first Ruby conference although I would argue ...
Read more ...A while ago, my good friend Michel Grootjans tweeted the following: Are developers (a) laborers or (b) professionals? If (a) don't...
Read more ...Functions are a very important concept in most programming languages, but they are even more important in JavaScript. When you read this as a C# or VB developer you probably won...
Read more ...After having listened to the recording of a speech by Daniel Pink, I quickly decided to purchase the audio version of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. ...
Read more ...I was taking a close look at the API documentation of the ExtJS JavaScript library the other day and I noticed something very interesting. You can see that the ExtJS fo...
Read more ...I wanted to pick up a book on jQuery for quite some time now so I decided to give jQuery in Action a try. Besides all the nice things I’ve heard and read about jQuery, I...
Read more ...Having this book on my shelf for quite some time now, I finally decided to to make my way through reading Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering written by Robert L...
Read more ...Throughout my career as a professional software developer, I’ve spent quite a lot of my learning time to sharpen my debugging skills. I’ve always considered this as on...
Read more ...A good number of folks have recommended me to pick up Object-Oriented JavaScript after I put out this book review on JavaScript – The Good Parts. They told m...
Read more ...In a previous blog post I showed a basic example of how to use the Delegate.CreateDelegate() method as an alternative to the slow MethodInfo.Invoke() for dynamically invoking a ...
Read more ...Earlier this week I ran into a little quirk with SQLite. Take a look at the following code snippet: using(var transaction = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Required...
Read more ...After hearing about this book in an interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck, I decided to immediately purchase the audio version on Audible and listen to it during my daily comm...
Read more ...IKVM.NET is something I’ve been playing with for a while now, but seeing this awesome trailer today reminded me that I should write a post about it. I always considered Java t...
Read more ...Judging from my previous post, some people might have come to the conclusion that I’m in the process of learning a wonderful programming language called JavaScript. Well, they’r...
Read more ...Today I finished reading JavaScript – The Good Parts written by Douglas Crockford. That picture on his website of him speaking with Chuck Norris on the background should...
Read more ...Don’t you just hate it when a class in the .NET Framework or another third-party library or framework provides that particular feature you’re looking for only to realize that th...
Read more ...Earlier this week I finished reading ASP.NET MVC in Action written by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard. I came across several good reviews about ...
Read more ...In my previous post on the subject, I showed how you can remove some of the friction caused by applying the State pattern. In fact, as some of you rightfully pointed out, this f...
Read more ...Last week, Greg Young wrote a blog post about State Pattern Misuse. In this post he talks about how ugly the State pattern can become if some operations are not allowed when the...
Read more ...In my previous posts, I showed the syntax for context/specifications using Machine.Specifications (or MSpec for short) and how to use an auto mocking container in conjunction wi...
Read more ...In my previous post, I explained how to get started with Machine.Specifications (or MSpec for short) and showed you how the syntax for context/specifications looks like when usi...
Read more ...Its been a while since I evaluated and evolved my approach to BDD. The way I’ve been doing BDD up until now is described in this blog post which goes way back to 2008. Everyone ...
Read more ...Its been a while since I enjoyed my adventures with CouchDB. I sure wish I could have some extra time to pick this up again, but getting some sleep at night is nice too once in ...
Read more ...Peter Cosemans, who is one of my colleagues, found a nice way to integrate ELMAH for a WCF service. ELMAH is an error logging facility for logging unhandled exceptions particula...
Read more ...As I already mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m kind of (re-)learning HTML and CSS. The best way for me to pick things up again is by getting my hands dirty and work myself ...
Read more ...A typical way for invoking a non-public method of a class is by using reflection. This can come in handy in a number of cases. One typical scenario that comes to mind is when th...
Read more ...If you’ve been using CSS for a while, then this post will probably teach you nothing new. I just wanted to state the obvious even if I’m the only one who benefits from it. Whil...
Read more ...After the Kaizenconf of 2008, I wrote down a couple of things I wanted to learn throughout 2009. Looking back at that list for the past year, I think I did fairly well. Retrosp...
Read more ...After listening to the keynote of Monospace 2009, I got somewhat intrigued by the possibilities of SUSE Studio. Miguel de Icaza talked about this in his presentation and because...
Read more ...As my bookshelf has grown out of proportion over the last years, I basically had two options left. First option was to build an extra room onto my house that could serve as a pr...
Read more ...About a year ago, I was lucky enough to attend the Kaizenconf in Austin. When I joined the discussions on ESB Patterns, Dru Sellers and Chris Patterson (also kno...
Read more ...Mark Nijhof is going to enlighten us all with his DDD/CQRS sample application. You can read all about it at the E-VAN blog.
Read more ...A while ago, I submitted a patch to AutoMapper that added basic support for mapping data from an IDataReader/IDataRecord to an object. For those of us who don't have the luxury ...
Read more ...I've been learning a bit more about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Drive Architecture (EDA) over the last couple of months. Something that kept coming back in the...
Read more ...Read all about it at the E-VAN blog.
Read more ...I just finished reading Enterprise Integration Patterns written by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. This book follows the same concept used by Martin Fowler and his marvelo...
Read more ...In my last post, I talked about a Generic Expression Builder class for easily creating domain entities through expression builders. This generic base class takes away some of th...
Read more ...I blogged about fluent interfaces and expression builders a couple of times before. For this post, I want to share a base class that I've been using for taking away some of the ...
Read more ...In a previous post, I talked about cascading deletes being a new feature introduced by NHibernate 2.0. If you haven't heard about this before, then you'd probably be interested ...
Read more ...To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...
Read more ...One of the downsides of being confronted with a shared legacy database day in and day out is that you have to map your domain objects to database tables that are also used by ot...
Read more ...To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...
Read more ...To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...
Read more ...Colin has set up a dedicated blog for the Europe Virtual ALT.NET gatherings. We'll be posting all announcements, details of recordings and any related stuff to this blog.
Read more ...To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...
Read more ...To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...
Read more ...In my previous posts, I provided a shallow introduction to CouchDB and how to get it installed on a Linux box. Here are the links to these posts: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) ...
Read more ...This time, Alan Dean is going to do a presentation about REST. If you want to learn more about REST, then here’s you’re chance. Colin had some really nice things to say about hi...
Read more ...I just wanted to share my attempt for implementing a generic base class for Value Objects, popularized by Eric Evans and the Domain-Driven Design community. I must say that I go...
Read more ...Udi Dahan did a mind blowing talk on SOA as well as on scalable and maintainable architectures. If you missed this great session, then you can watch the recording. Udi Dahan on...
Read more ...In my previous post, I talked about some introductory topics regarding CouchDB. In this post I want to walk you through some of the hurdles you need to take when you want to ins...
Read more ...The last couple of months, I heard some buzz around CouchDB at several user groups. Listening to this podcast really got me interested, so I decided to learn more about it in or...
Read more ...Earlier this year, Ivan Porto Carrero did a quite enjoyable presentation on IronRuby for the Dutch ALT.NET user group. I recently picked up the early access edition of his book ...
Read more ...This time, Udi Dahan will be on the next European VAN answering all your questions about DDD, SOA, CQS, Messaging, NServiceBus, ... If you have questions, please post them on th...
Read more ...Mark Nijhof did a great job explaining some of the concepts of FubuMVC and showed some of the code from the sample applications of FubuMVC Contrib (including his own blog). If y...
Read more ...This time, we're doing a regular presentation. Mark Nijhof, one of the contributors of FubuMVC, will shed some light on this Front Controller style MVC framework for building we...
Read more ...A couple of months ago, I bought the early access edition of SOA Patterns after Colin Jack recommended it on Twitter. So far, only the first five chapters are available, but I s...
Read more ...Today I found myself writing the following code: private void DoSomething(String userName) { using(var userEntry = GetUserEntryFor(userName)) if(CouldBeFound(userEn...
Read more ...This time, we're going to try an open session. We're all open for suggestions, but Colin suggested Fluent NHibernate or the state of ALT.NET (for more info, see here and here) w...
Read more ...As you might have guessed from my previous two blog posts, I've been experimenting with fluent interfaces lately. I've been thinking about passing an expression builder to an ag...
Read more ...Yesterday, I finished listening to the 4-Hour Workweek and I really liked it. That's right, I said 'listening' because I have the audio version of the book. While the titl...
Read more ...I just wanted to share this quote that I've read while I was skimming through Enterprise Integration Patterns. This paragraph clearly phrases my thoughts about a Shared ...
Read more ...About a year ago, I wrote a post about Directory Programming with System.DirectoryServices. AccountManagement. I've been using the AccountManagement API of the .NET 3.5 framewor...
Read more ...David wrote this post about a month ago where he challenged the usefulness of fluent interfaces. One of his concerns is the discoverability of a fluent API in order to determine...
Read more ...I just want to point out a small tidbit I ran into earlier this week. I was using the following simplified expression builder that provides a fluent interface for creating an in...
Read more ...Reusable Mappings Something that slightly bothered me with the XML mappings of NHibernate, is the fact that some things need to be configured over and over again. Behold the fol...
Read more ...You may have noticed that I didn't get around to write that many blog posts over the last two months. While some of you may regret this, others would argue that the universe has...
Read more ...Great demo on REST and the OpenRasta framework by Sebastien Lambla last night. If you missed it, you can now watch the recording. Sebastien Lambla on REST and OpenRasta @ E-VA...
Read more ...Yesterday I stopped reading LINQ in Action after I read just the first two parts about LINQ to Objects and the last part about building your own LINQ provider. Although ...
Read more ...This time, Sebastien Lambla will enlighten us with a talk about REST and the OpenRasta framework. Again, every geek on this planet is free to attend. Here are the details: Sta...
Read more ...Greg Young did a great job during the first European VAN, talking about Domain-Driven Design and messaging. If you missed it, you can now watch the recording. Greg Young on DDD...
Read more ...Due to some technical difficulties, we were forced to reschedule the first European VAN meeting. It seems that using Office Live Meeting on a Mac is not a great combination. I g...
Read more ...The first 'official' virtual ALT.NET meeting for the old continent has been scheduled for next Monday (02/02/2009). For this first one, Greg Young is kind enough to share some o...
Read more ...Robert C. Martin calls 'Craftsmanship over Crap' the fifth principle of the agile manifesto. I've been writing a lot on this blog about writing clean code and qualities that eve...
Read more ...I'm just in time for my 100th blog post for this year. As I mentioned last year, I think this is my absolute ceiling when it comes to writing blog posts, but you'll never know. ...
Read more ...I'm really looking forward to the next Dutch ALT.NET meeting where Yves Goeleven will discuss DDD practices while having a look at a real production application. I think we'll h...
Read more ...When using Visual Studio 2008, it is possible to use most of the new language additions of C# 3.0 in a .NET 2.0 project. This because the C# 3.0 compiler is used for both .NET 2...
Read more ...I’ve been reading a lot of code lately. When I’m doing this, I find it very important to have some unit tests that makes it easier for me to comprehend the actual production cod...
Read more ...Creating a versionable ASMX Web Service is something that was really hard to do in .NET 1.1, mostly because it involved a lot of work and discipline. Creating versionable servic...
Read more ...Again lots and lots of interesting discussions during the recent Dutch ALT.NET meeting. My employer kindly lent us a nice meeting room to facilitate us geeks. Again, muchos grac...
Read more ...I’ve been playing around with StructureMap for the last couple of days and I must say that I’m really impressed. I had no troubles in quickly getting up to speed with this amazi...
Read more ...Ayende blogged about this web site which you can use to analyze the text on your blog (and those of others). It makes some guesses about the personality of the person(s) that wr...
Read more ...We ran into an issue last week when we were deploying a WCF service on an IIS web site which had multiple IIS bindings. It manifested itself by throwing the following exception:...
Read more ...This delightful post from Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin describes with much better sentences what I was trying to express with my latest post Professional Under Pressure. When ...
Read more ...A first delivery of our current project is going into production very soon. The team has worked hard and is still working very hard to straighten out the last issues. As with ev...
Read more ...This morning, I spent the first 30 minutes of my day figuring out why the CI build failed after I checked in some changes to the code. No big deal, right? I just messed up. Tur...
Read more ...After attending the Advanced NHibernate workshop at the Kaizen Conference, I started to do some experimenting with NHibernate in order to gather more in dept knowledge about my ...
Read more ...In my previous post, I outlined an issue that I had with Castle Windsor for configuring multiple chains of responsibility. I want to have different ProcessConsumer classes that ...
Read more ...A couple of months ago, I applied the Chain of Responsibility pattern for the very first time. I've never encountered a scenario before where applying this pattern would be a va...
Read more ...I read Beyond Code during my flight to Austin for the Kaizenconf. It was a quite enjoyable book that focuses on how to distinguish yourself as a software developer. As you may ...
Read more ...I've been playing with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP bits, and I tried to see what named and optional parameters in C# 4.0 can bring to the table. Although they are minor language ...
Read more ...The last day of the conference was all about taking action as a community. Which actions should be taken based on the open-space sessions of the day before? I attended the ESB P...
Read more ...After the pre-conference workshops, it was finally time to kick-off the open-space conference itself. Before Steven "Doc" List held his opening speech, Oren and Glenn couldn't w...
Read more ...My colleague Peter and myself got back yesterday from Austin, Texas where we had one of the greatest learning experiences ever: the Kaizen Continuous Improve...
Read more ...Peter and yours truly arrived at Austin yesterday for attending the Kaizenconf. I've been really looking forward to this. Hope to meet you there. If you see two goofy European g...
Read more ...Earlier this year, I wrote this blog post about exploring Behavior-Driven Development as a better way of doing Test-Driven Development. In this post, I spoke about how to organi...
Read more ...I've been a long time user of MyInfo, a personal information manager in which I keep a long history of information that I've assembled over the last couple of years as a develop...
Read more ...I just finished reading C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3. Although the book is only 358 pages, it's title is certainly not exaggerated. It feels like I've...
Read more ...Reading Joel Spolsky's latest article, Sins of Commissions, reminded me about a topic that I feel very strongly about, namely incentives for software developers based on some ki...
Read more ...Ray Houston has written this post on his blog named Single-Responsibility Versus Needless Complexity. His post contains the following code sample of which he suspects that it po...
Read more ...I just finished reading the magnificent book Clean Code - A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. I must say, if I would have a software company of my own, then I would forc...
Read more ...I'm having more and more mixed feelings about properties in .NET, or accessor methods in general, as properties compile to get_xxx/set_xxx methods behind the covers. I've never ...
Read more ...I'll let you in on a little secret. The key to writing good comments is ... (rolling the drums) ... not writing them at all! Let me elaborate on that. To me, there are two kinds...
Read more ...I know that there are numerous blog posts already written about this topic, but I just can't resist. I've just had it with commented-out code. Sure, everybody agrees that this i...
Read more ...I just finished reading Release It!. I know that Ayende is really fond of this book, and I can't blame him. Like most books I've read over the last couple of years, this book i...
Read more ...I've just came across the following quote from Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software that fully describes the point I tried to make in my previous post on "On...
Read more ...Earlier this week I went back to work after a refreshing (and very much needed) vacation. During this past week I participated in some interesting discussions that made me think...
Read more ...I already had this book lying around on my desk for about 2 years now. Boy, am I a douche bag for no reading it sooner. I welcome this book into my personal hall of fame...
Read more ...Suppose we are building yet-another-order-basket-application. We have the requirement for adding items to an order, otherwise the business of our entire company falls down and w...
Read more ...On the DDD user group, there has been endless discussions about whether a service or repository can be directly called by classes that are part of the domain model. There is a g...
Read more ...... I wrote my very first blog post (in Dutch). I've learned a lot of stuff since then. Time really flies, I must say.
Read more ...Yesterday I got back from a refreshing holiday in Italy. First thing I noticed after opening my RSS reader was that NHibernate 2.0 got released. Aah, life couldn't get any bette...
Read more ...I finally got my new desktop up-and-running and fully installed. Last weekend, me and my dear colleague Sven Erkens (kudos!) assembled the different parts to what became a lean,...
Read more ...This is what I consider to be a good architecture for long-lived business applications and how I like to design them. Actually, our current and past two projects apply this desi...
Read more ..."Let us cleanup and fix this code later so we can meet our deadline".
Read more ...It should solve a problem and thus it must be valuable to its users. In short, it should do what it must do and simply work. It should be very easy to change. Every piece of...
Read more ...Last week, I decided that the time has come to replace my current desktop PC. I've been skimming through a couple of articles and reviews in order to put together a new home dev...
Read more ...As you might have noticed from my previous post, I'm having a look at some of the stuff on my ever growing cool-tools-and-technologies-I-have-to-grock list. The next one that wa...
Read more ...A while ago, I wrote a blog post regarding Test Data Builders Refined. Earlier this week, I wrote a very simple base class that provides an implicit cast operator for the builde...
Read more ...A while ago, I wrote this post about how to integrate Castle Windsor and NHibernate with WCF. Last weekend, I used the WCF integration facility of Castle Windsor to accomplish p...
Read more ...Like Karl Seguin's most excellent book about the Foundations of the Programming (which is highly recommended), this book covers the basics that each programmer should live and b...
Read more ...Yesterday, me, myself and Peter went to the first Dutch ALT.NET gathering. Besides being stuck in traffic for more than an hour, I had a great time. There were some great conver...
Read more ...I want to put out a short sequel to my previous post on Active Conventions with NDepend. Also make sure to read Patrick Smacchia's follow-up if your interested. As you may or ma...
Read more ...Some time ago Patrick Smacchia wrote a nice article on his blog about active conventions on your code base. I thought I tried this for myself and made up some interesting CQL qu...
Read more ...You have to hand it to these people: they sure have to put up with a lot of crap. I'm also guilty as charged for this. I already wrote about a lack of real-world usability and b...
Read more ...Writing this book review feels kind of weird because it hasn't actually hit the shelves yet. It is accessible however through the Manning Early Access Program. This book provid...
Read more ...Today I hunted down a bug in Visual Studio 2005 that annoyed me tremendously for the past couple of weeks. Starting from this certain point in time, without any reason whatsoeve...
Read more ...What is elegant code? Everyone agrees that this is a rather subjective topic. I wrote down my take on this matter not so long ago. Almost every developer out there (an probably ...
Read more ...That's the title of the latest .NET Rocks episode. No big deal, just one of the better podcast episodes out there. Microsoft, are you listening? Maybe you should put your chairm...
Read more ...It seems that I managed to convince another one of my dear colleagues to start blogging (if my children thaught me one thing, it's that constant whining actually works!). Peter ...
Read more ...Up until now, we were using the NHibernate facility of Castle Windsor for managing our NHibernate sessions in WCF. But, we want to have a session-per-request approach as one wou...
Read more ...One of the areas where NHibernate really shines is it's high extensibility features. The NHibernate API provides a massive amount of interfaces that can be implemented for your ...
Read more ...Today I spent some time (thank God no more than 15 minutes) tracking down a WCF issue from hell. Every time I made a call to the service I got the following exception: System.Se...
Read more ...Earlier this week, I managed to convince our very wise decision makers to start using NHibernate for our persistence layer. My team mate on the project describes how it went. Wh...
Read more ...Last year, I blogged about Test Data Builders here and here. I still use them heavily in my unit tests for creating objects with test data. Heck, I also use this pattern for flu...
Read more ...I think I'm going to be brief about this one. Everything you ever heard or read about this book is true. If you don't have this book already, then go get it right now because yo...
Read more ...The first alpha version of NHibernate 2.0 has been released some time ago. Oren has put a nice overview of the new features and the bugs that are solved for this first drop. In ...
Read more ...Earlier this week I was in a meeting were someone stated that it was better to write your own IOC container than just using an existing one (the most excellent Castle Windsor in...
Read more ...From each of these technologies I have a book laying around on my bookshelf somewhere. For WF, I have bought Essential Windows Workflow Foundation about 1 year ago. Since then, ...
Read more ...David Starr from Elegant Code asked me whether I wanted to join his blogging group and I accepted. From now on, I will be the first European Elegant Code blogger. I want to than...
Read more ...The Elegant Code Essay contest that is. I just won a free copy of Beautiful Code. You can read my essay here. Many thanks to the nice people of Elegant Code.
Read more ...This blog has been silent for a while, and for good reason. Besides experiencing symptoms of writer's block, I've also been playing around with a lot of new stuff (at least new...
Read more ...I would like to make a service announcement from the JetBrains fan club: TeamCity 3.1 is here! I took me about 15 minutes to upgrade my existing home installation. It actually t...
Read more ...This is THE book on Active Directory and LDAP programming in .NET. Why? Because it's the only book that covers System.DirectoryServices. This book contains a lot of tips & ...
Read more ...I finished reading the excellent article It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings written by Jason Yip. Somewhere in the beginning of this article, the aut...
Read more ...There's a really interesting discussion going on at the ALT.NET user group about Behavior Driven Development. This post from Jimmy Bogard really hit home. It clearly describes B...
Read more ...Bart Waeterschoot is blogging on IntoFactories.NET. I'm glad he joined the blogosphere. Bart is a very smart guy and I'm looking forward to more of his writing. Nonetheless, I h...
Read more ...There's this heated discussion going on at the ALT.NET forum about Unity, a lightweight IOC container coming from P&P (make sure that you pick up this post at ALT.NET Pursef...
Read more ...This article, Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering, really struck a nerve. It's very well written and well thought out. I'll jump right to the conc...
Read more ...While I was reading The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming yesterday, I came across this passage called Close or Dispose? There's a class called DirectoryE...
Read more ...Last months MSDN Magazine contains a very interesting article that titles Managing Directory Security Principals in the .NET Framework 3.5. Its a nice introduction to the classe...
Read more ...This in one of my pet peeves. Its simply none negotiable! I still don't understand why it can be turned off. Heck, I don't understand why its not turned on by default. I ...
Read more ...You might think that I suffer from a severe case of acronymitis judging from the title of this post, but the only thing I suffer from right now is a terrible cold. Anyway, I'm c...
Read more ...In my previous post I mentioned how easy it is to incorporate code coverage into TeamCity using NCover/NCoverExplorer. I'm using the NCoverExplorer Extras package that can be do...
Read more ...In my previous post on JetBrains TeamCity I mentioned that it has no support for .NET code coverage. With this post I want to correct the injustice of this statement. It was a ...
Read more ...I've been goofing around with TeamCity over the last week. After reading some posts about TeamCity (1)(2), I decided to give it a try. In my continuous quest to eliminate the am...
Read more ...When writing unit tests that involve interaction based testing, you most likely end up using one of the mocking frameworks out there. The mocking framework I'm using is Rhino Mo...
Read more ...I'm a huge fan of Total Commander for as long as I can remember. Thinking about it, I'm using it for more than 10 years now. Today, I accidentally discovered a very nice feature...
Read more ...A while ago, I blogged about using Test Data Builders as opposed to the Object Mother pattern. Here are some links to additional tips and tricks: Tricks with Test Data Builders...
Read more ...Alex Henderson picked up on my "Why O Why" post in his take on the Pluggable IoC in WPF Composite & Enterprise Library v.Next. I still believe that an IoC Application Block...
Read more ...Glenn Block announced on the ALT.NET Yahoo Group that the P&P team is developing a new dependency injection framework. To say it with the words of Captain Alberto Bertorelli...
Read more ...This great Dilbert cartoon was put on the ALT.NET Yahoo Group earlier this week. Although it is really funny, it also illustrates some of the misconceptions about agile software...
Read more ...Driving home from work, I listened to this podcast on the Design and Evolution of C++. Somewhere half way through, Ted Neward mentions the new thread library in C++0x. I found H...
Read more ...There is a reason that this book is on the recommend reading list of the ALT.NET Wiki. For some reason, I had this book lying around on my desk for almost a year before I starte...
Read more ...In this post I put out some code for checking method arguments. I changed it somewhat regarding value types:public void DoSomethingMeaningfull(Int32 someNumber) { // Throws Ar...
Read more ...The Joins Concurrency Library I've listened to this podcast on DotNetRocks a while ago and I remember to be quite exited about this Microsoft Research project. The session at Te...
Read more ...Windows Communication Foundation Performance You got to hand it to him: Justin Smith certainly has some interesting things to say about WCF. A few months ago, I have read his ex...
Read more ...LINQ to XML: Using the Language Integrated Query Framework with XML Data Nice introduction talk on the new XML API for creating, querying and modifying XML. Although this is YAX...
Read more ...Secure Distributed Applications with WCF Dominick Baier of Thinktecture certainly knows his stuff, but for some other reason he couldn't manage to bring the message to his aud...
Read more ...Soma announced some new stuff in his keynote, among which the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. Unless you have been living in a cave for the last week, ...
Read more ...We arrived at Barcelona last week on Saturday evening with a delegation of seven people. The same evening, we already visited the Monjuic Magic Fountains on Plaza España. ...
Read more ...Something that was bothering me for a while now was writing the following piece of code over and over again: public void DoSomething(Request request) { if(null == request) ...
Read more ...Scott Guthrie announced the new ASP.NET MVC framework at the Alt.Net conference today. I blogged about this earlier on. Jeffrey Palermo who is attending the conference has put s...
Read more ...When writing unit tests, I frequently have an issue with creating objects that contain some test data. One approach is to call the constructor of the class at hand in every test...
Read more ...Mark Monster has written an excellent article on Dependency Injection in the newest .NET Magazine (it's no MSDN magazine, but hey, its free of charge). Nonetheless, there are tw...
Read more ...Are you doing Test-Driven Development or Bug Driven Development? From my experiences, test-driven development seems to slow you down at the beginning of a project. This isn't en...
Read more ...Scott Bellware: I think that the difference between a good developer and an excellent developer is the excellent developer's willingness to not know, an openness to explore, and...
Read more ...This is the title of an awesome talk that Chris Richardson gave at the Spring One 2007 conference in Antwerp. You can watch this session online. He gives a really nice introduct...
Read more ...I'm with Scott on this one. The fact that Microsoft duplicates the efforts of their own community is simply inexcusable. Why does this bother me? Using the best tool or library ...
Read more ...Just read an excellent blog post on The Myth of Software Estimation. The author claims that the relationship between humans and computers is just as unpredictable as ...
Read more ...A good craftsman can be recognized by the tools he's using. Therefore its time again for the world famous, ever growing Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users...
Read more ...Another must-read post by Jeff Atwood on how Discipline Makes Strong Developers. I couldn't agree more. Only discipline on the part of the developers makes code that is concise ...
Read more ...One of the things I've picked up from the big book of developer tools is CruiseControl.NET aka CC.NET. CC.NET is a continuous integration system that automates the entire build,...
Read more ...Check out the I Hate SSIS page on the Ayende's wiki. SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services. I've never worked with it before (I have little experience with DTS), but I...
Read more ...Over the weekend, I finished reading Windows Developer Power Tools. Its this huge and heavy book with 1207 pages of 170+ free tool goodness. The danger of buying a book like thi...
Read more ...Another excellent post on TDD by Jeremy D. Miller. The following quote is something that needs to be up on the wall: DO learn how RhinoMocks works or DO NOT use it. Seriously...
Read more ...Earlier this week, I've been listening to the .NET Rocks podcast, John Lam on the DLR. I must admit, I'm looking forward to IronRuby. Now, somewhere half way the show, Carl Fra...
Read more ...This post made me laugh out loud. Here are a few that I really liked: The Continuous Integration server has returned the error message “Fuck it, I give up” I've actually seen ...
Read more ...Good code should read like a good book. Combine these two and you get a book like Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think. I've had it on my wishlist for a wh...
Read more ...If you're interested on agile development, this blog post on Agile Team Dynamics is a must-read. I especially like the idea of banning e-mails for inter-team communication.
Read more ...After a code review session earlier this week, I was wondering if I am the only one who uses the FCL type names (e.g. Int32) instead of their language-agnostic counterparts (e.g...
Read more ...Charles Petzold gives some great advice at how to read a book. He mentions some of the tips 'n tricks I already learned over the past couple of years: Don't get distracted in ...
Read more ...You're a Doer.You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After ...
Read more ...Great summary on being ALT.NET. I don't completely agree with the hot-or-not list of Roy, therefore I like the modified list of Sam much more. My goal in life is to be ALT.NET a...
Read more ...Daniel Simmons, talks about persistence ignorance and how it will be incorporated in next version(s) of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. In a previous post, I already mentioned the...
Read more ...It seems that Microsoft is not pleased with the fact that my favorite VS add-in offers support for the VS Express SKU. You can read all about it in this post from Jamie Cansdale...
Read more ...It seems that Jimmy Nilsson also has a lot of trouble with ASP.NET. As you know (or might not know), I'm not enjoying my experiences with ASP.NET either. Enough with the ASP.NET...
Read more ...Over the weekend I watched this screen cast from Oren Eini. You should have a look at it, even if you're completely not interested in mocking frameworks. The best commercial of ...
Read more ...The highly respected Scott Hanselman talks about his experiences at RailsConf in Portland. You can find his already legendary post here. I think its time to have a look at Ruby ...
Read more ...At work there's a discussion going on whether we will choose NUnit or Team System Unit Test for our unit tests. Currently we have about 1000+ unit tests written in NUnit and we ...
Read more ...I just finished reading a book written by Phillip Khan-Panni, and its not about any of the latest cool technologies or methodologies, but about efficient communication between u...
Read more ...In my journey to explore the Windows Communication Foundation, I came across an issue that confused me at first but actually made some sense after spending half a day figuring t...
Read more ...I'm a big fan of the Opera web browser for many years now. I like it because it's the underdog. They don't have the same market share as IE and Firefox, but I find it the most i...
Read more ...After reading this post from David Laribee, I promptly put the four criteria to be an ALT.NET developer on our team portal. 1/ You’re the type of developer who uses what work...
Read more ...A while ago I blogged about Domain-Driven Design and how I like it so much. I mentioned that Tim McCarthy is writing a book that I'm pretty much looking forward to. Today he ann...
Read more ...This is both funny and true.
Read more ...The forthcoming release of NUnit 2.4 supports a constraint-based syntax for assertions. Don't worry, the old syntax (classic model) is still going to be available for a long tim...
Read more ...Essential reading from Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo about building a solid core. This post contains a number of truths that I want to point out. Many developers need to spend more time...
Read more ...Great sessions and content on the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007. The following sessions where my favorites: WCF communication patterns: more than request-reply and Beyond ABC...
Read more ...I followed the web development track today. Jeff Prosise delivered great content in his sessions on ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E. I'm still a bit brainwashed by the propaganda, but I'...
Read more ...I'll be attending the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007. Hope to meet you there ...
Read more ...From my previous post, you can guess that I'm definitely a Thrill seeker. What kind of developer/person are you?
Read more ...This is just about the best thing I've heard in the last couple of years. Scott Guthrie showed a prototype of an MVC framework on the MVP Summit (ship it!). This framework can b...
Read more ...The blogosphere is full with posts about how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is violating Persistence Ignorance by letting domain classes inherit from an abstract base class in ord...
Read more ...This post of Jeremy D. Miller hits it right on the head: In .NET development, and especially ASP.NET WebForms development, you often have to go out of your way to create testa...
Read more ...I'm so much into Domain-Driven Design! I already read Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns and I just finished reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Compl...
Read more ...I'm convinced that this guy does not sleep at night (or his time management must be awesome). He does so many blog posts a day, he must be a cyborg of some sort ;-) or is he a t...
Read more ...Although I'm 100% .NET, C++ is still my favorite programming language. You have to take care of cleaning up your own mess, no garbage collector to rescue your application from m...
Read more ...Another perspective from Steve Eichert. He claims that developers are not leaving .NET because of what Rails is doing right, but instead because of what .NET is doing wrong. Per...
Read more ...Great follow-up by Jeremy D. Miller for The Anti Team. You can find this blog post here. You should give it a good read! Good teams challenge their approach every single day and...
Read more ...While I was doing the dishes today, I was thinking about the programming model of ASP.NET and the fact that I don't like it (just as don't like doing the dishes). The model it u...
Read more ...A very nice post by Uncle Bob about rapid software development. We've all done it! Pulling together those quick & dirty hacks in order to meet our deadline. We've created so...
Read more ...A very useful subject today on the Visual Studio Code Analysis Team Blog called: What exception should I throw instead of the reserved exceptions that DoNotRaiseReservedExceptio...
Read more ...Another great manifest by Jeremy D. Miller, called The Anti Team. Especially the first one is a very recognizable team role and especially the one I hate most: the non-coding ar...
Read more ...I just finished reading Kiwidude's rant about using Sandcastle to generate documentation for .NET 2.0 applications and libraries. I'm using it for a couple of months now and I m...
Read more ...It's simply the best, better than all the rest: VMware Workstation 6.0 beta can be downloaded here. Besides support for Windows Vista and multiple monitor display, VMware Workst...
Read more ...Today I was working my way through migrating a web service application from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. One of the things that I came across was the new architecture of the System.Con...
Read more ...While the blogosphere is full of the first CTP of WPF/E, I'm want to mention something about an old technology, namely WCF. The nice people of IDesign already published their C#...
Read more ...Today I learned something that I never considered before: I didn't realize (until today) that the maximum command line length for the CreateProcess Win32 API function is 32767 c...
Read more ...Today I've read an excellent article written by Jimmy Nilsson about The Cost of GUIDs as Primary Keys. A must-read article when your using GUIDs as primary keys in your database...
Read more ...I recently came across the .NET Mock Objects project. This framework supplies mock implementations of the ADO.NET generic interfaces like IDataReader, IDbConnection, etc. (curre...
Read more ...I just read an introductionary article about LINQ. There are some things that I like and there are some things that I don't like. Big deal, you would say: get on with your life!...
Read more ...Jeff Atwood’s latest post is very clear on this matter: Visual SourceSafe is absolute crap. Here a some quotes: If you are serious about the practice of software developmen...
Read more ...The September 2006 issue of MSDN magazine has a great article about the new features in System.Xml 2.0. I used (and I am still using) this part of the .NET Framework a lot and h...
Read more ...What happens when my favorite VS.NET add-in meets with my favorite .NET tool? Pure horse power baby!! Watch the demo here.
Read more ...I am currently reading The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky. I simply love it. I’m coming to this point that I more appreciate this kind of books...
Read more ...You should definitely read this fine article about exception handling. When it comes to exception handling, there is still a lot of confusion amongst us, developers. With all th...
Read more ...A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a fr...
Read more ...Billy Hollis posted a short history of the C family of languages. My favorite programming language family. Enjoy!
Read more ...Finally, finally, finally, … Debug.Assert now works with ASP.NET 2.0. You have to love those little improvements they did for .NET 2.0. When using version 1.1 of the .NET framew...
Read more ...Back in the good old Win32 days it was considered a best practice to rebase all your DLLs. Every executable and DLL has a preferred base address. This base address is the memory...
Read more ...In Visual Studio 2005, you now have the ability to use the pdb-only debug information option. This underestimated debug option is available for the command- line C# compiler, bu...
Read more ...The .NET 1.1 framework internally uses the IXmlSerializable interface for custom XML serialisation of certain classes. In fact the only class that I can come up with is the Data...
Read more ...Een memorabele dag vandaag: mijn allereerste blog! Ik zal hier een varieteit aan onderwerpen ‘bloggen’ maar hoofdzakelijk over software ontwikkeling allerhande. Deze postings za...
Read more ...
March 5, 2026
February 3, 2026
August 8, 2025
June 28, 2023
April 12, 2023
The opinions expressed on this blog are my own personal opinions. These do NOT represent anyone else’s view on the world in any way whatsoever.
Thank you for visiting my website. I’m a professional software developer since Y2K. A blogger since Y2K+5. Author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. Provider of training and coaching in XP practices. Curator of the Awesome Talks list. Thinking and learning about all kinds of technologies since forever.
(+32) 496 38 00 82
info@principal-it.be
