Contract Tests - Parameterised Test Cases
June 28, 2023This 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 ...
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Contract Tests - Abstract Test Cases
April 12, 2023In 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 ...Contract Tests
February 1, 2023One 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 ...The Testing Quadrant
June 15, 2022Back 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 ...Tales Of TDD: The Big Refactoring
February 2, 2022I’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 ...Implementing Approval Tests For PDF Document Generation
December 15, 2021In 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 ...Approval Tests For PDF Document Generation
October 7, 2021A 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 ...Ignoring Tests
June 22, 2021Most 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 ...Writing Maintainable Unit Tests In Print
April 23, 2021I’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 ...Tales Of TDD: The Case Of Overused Test Doubles
March 31, 2021Do 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 ...Book Launch: Writing Maintainable Unit Tests
February 17, 2021I’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 ...Avoid Inheritance For Test Classes
January 6, 2021Using 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 ...How To Write Unit Tests For Logging
November 11, 2020Once 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 ...Prevent Domain Knowledge From Sneaking Into Solitary Tests
September 30, 2020Previously 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 ...Why Solitary Tests Should Be Easy To Read
September 9, 2020Occasionally 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 ...Tales Of TDD: Stressed And Always In A Hurry
August 19, 2020So 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 ...Dealing With Date/Time In Solitary Tests
August 4, 2020Solitary 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 ...Announcing Book: Writing Maintainable Unit Tests
July 15, 2020I’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 ...Only Test Through Public Interfaces
July 1, 2020One 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 ...Inside-Out and Outside-In TDD
June 16, 2020Test-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 ...Test Double Heuristics
June 3, 2020In 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 ...Excessive Specification of Test Doubles
May 20, 2020Previously 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 ...The Boundaries of Solitary Tests
May 6, 2020When 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 ...Test Doubles
April 8, 2020In 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 ...Indirect Inputs and Outputs
April 1, 2020Previously 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 ...State versus Behaviour Verification
March 25, 2020When 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 ...Cascading Failures
March 18, 2020In 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 ...The Designing versus Testing Mindset
March 12, 2020Previously, 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 ...Why Write Maintainable Unit Tests?
March 4, 2020Last 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 ...Announcing Video Course: Writing Maintainable Unit Tests
February 26, 2020I’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 ...The Test Pyramid
November 7, 2019In 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 ...A Taxonomy Of Tests
October 8, 2019It’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 ...Fast Feedback
September 3, 2019Test-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 ...Debugability Considered Useful
January 3, 2019Developers 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 ...Blaming Mocks For Bad Design
December 18, 2018A 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 ...Listening to the Vital Signs of TDD
November 8, 2018People 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 ...All in the Name of DRY
September 25, 2018A 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 ...Memo on O-Ring and Software Erosion
March 3, 2016One 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 ...Learning F# - The Thunderdome Principle for Functions
December 26, 2015Back 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 ...Learning F# - Passing Parameters to Functions
December 17, 2015One 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 ...The Burden of Features in Software
November 21, 2015I’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 ...Product or Project Focused
October 24, 2015A 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 ...Premature Abstraction
October 17, 2015The 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 ...The Quest for the One True Static Site Generator
October 10, 2015When 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 ...Using F# in Sublime Text on Linux Mint
June 5, 2015I’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 ...Hacking Endeavours - A Tale About Having Fun
January 29, 2015Some 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 ...Out of the Tar Pit
May 9, 2014A 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 ...Clojure Kata #3 – Roman Numerals
April 29, 2014I’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 ...Awesome talks
January 17, 2014There 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 ...Clojure Kata #2 – The Bowling Game
January 2, 2014As 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 ...Clojure Kata #1 – Fizz Buzz
December 19, 2013I’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 ...Node-m-r – A Simple CQRS Example using Node.js
December 12, 2013Anyone 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 ...Either.js
December 5, 2013Some 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 ...Detecting the End of a Rainbow Inside a Writable Stream
October 14, 2013I 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js – The Towering Inferno Revisited
August 15, 2013Soon 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 ...Byte Magazine Archives
July 26, 2013Earlier 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 ...Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
July 19, 2013A 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with ScriptCS
May 31, 2013I’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 ...Introducing node-validation
May 3, 2013Some 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 ...Basic JavaScript: Prototypical Inheritance vs. Functional Inheritance
March 22, 2013Inheritance 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 ...Confessions of a Sublime Text-aholic
February 22, 2013It’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 ...Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript
February 8, 2013Earlier 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js - Express Routing Revisited
February 1, 2013Last 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 ...Visual Studio Light Edition
November 30, 2012I 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 ...Steve Jobs - The Biography by Walter Isaacson
August 7, 2012At 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 ...Blitz
July 24, 2012The 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 ...Outliers – The Story of Success
July 17, 2012A 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 ...My Developers Life–The Social Media Diet
July 3, 2012In 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 ...My Developers Life - The Importance of Physical Exercise
June 12, 2012In 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 ...My Developers Life - The Importance of Sleep
May 29, 2012When 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js – Passport
May 15, 2012Recently 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js - Express Error Handling
April 6, 2012In 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js - Thou Shalt Not Deny Asynchrony
March 27, 2012A 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js - Npm Police
March 23, 2012Earlier 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 ...Book Review: Just for Fun
February 28, 2012A 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 ...Book Review: The Unix Programming Environment
February 22, 2012A 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 ...View Collation in CouchDB
February 14, 2012A 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 ...Introducing TrackMyRun
January 24, 2012I’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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js - Express Routing
January 21, 2012In 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 ...Retrospective of 2011, Looking Ahead to 2012
December 30, 2011Yep, 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 ...Taking Toddler Steps with Node.js – Express
December 23, 2011< 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Linking Local Packages with npm
December 16, 2011< 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – BDD Style Unit Tests with Jasmine and CoffeeScript
October 18, 2011< 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 ...The Cathedral and the Bazaar
October 14, 2011A 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 ...Presenting “Taking Baby Steps with Node.js” at Agile.NET 2011 Europe
September 23, 2011In 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 ...An Observation about TDD
September 9, 2011To 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 ...Book Review: The Clean Coder
September 6, 2011Earlier 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 ...Book Reviews: CoffeeScript and JavaScript Web Applications
August 16, 2011While 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 ...Dynamic in C# is Broken
August 11, 2011Earlier 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 ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 6 - Show Me the Goodies !
August 9, 2011For 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 ...Moving from E-TextEditor to Sublime Text 2
August 5, 2011I’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 TextMate for the Window...
Read more ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 5 - Ranges, Loops and Comprehensions
August 2, 2011For 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 ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 4 - Objects and Classes
July 26, 2011For 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 ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 3 - More on Functions
July 13, 2011For 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Don’t Block The Event Loop
July 5, 2011< 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 ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 2 - Variables and Functions
June 30, 2011As 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 ...Book Review: Hands-on Node.js
June 28, 2011Last 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 ...Exploring CoffeeScript Part 1 – And Then There Was Coffee
June 21, 2011Those 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – The E-VAN Presentation
June 15, 2011The 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 ...A Quartet of Book Reviews
May 27, 2011Since 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – npm 1.0
May 10, 2011< 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – WebSockets
May 4, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js–Creating TCP Servers
April 29, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – The Towering Inferno
April 20, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Some Node.js Goodies
April 12, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Pumping Data Between Streams
April 6, 2011Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 12: Function Hoisting
March 24, 2011Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...Book Review: C# in Depth–2nd Edition
March 22, 2011I 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – “node_modules” Folders
March 17, 2011Here 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 ...Git-Tfs – Where Have You Been All My Life
March 15, 2011My 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – BDD Style Unit Tests with Jasmine-Node Sprinkled With Some Should
March 7, 2011Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 11: Functional Initialization
March 5, 2011Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...Book Review – Driving Technical Change: Why People on Your Team Don't Act on Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should
February 25, 2011I 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Implementing Events
February 21, 2011Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 10: The Module Pattern
February 15, 2011Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Propert...
Read more ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Node Version Management with n
February 9, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – CommonJS and Creating Custom Modules
February 5, 2011Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 9: Reusing Methods of Other Objects
January 31, 2011Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Propert...
Read more ...Basic JavaScript Part 8: Namespaces
January 26, 2011Here are the links to the previous installments: Functions Objects Prototypes Enforcing New on Constructor Functions Hoisting Automatic Semicolon Insertion Static Proper...
Read more ...Book Review – Extreme Programming Explained
January 21, 2011Last 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 7: Static Properties and Methods
January 19, 2011Here 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Debugging with node-inspector
January 14, 2011Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 6: Automatic Semicolon Insertion
January 12, 2011Here 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 ...The Social Network
January 10, 2011Over 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 ...Book Review – JavaScript Patterns
January 8, 2011Earlier 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 ...My Personal and Professional Goals for 2011
December 29, 2010Around 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 5: Hoisting
December 24, 2010Here 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 4: Enforcing New on Constructor Functions
December 21, 2010As 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 ...Christmas Light Architectures Are Not That Shiny
December 17, 2010I 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Using Non-Standard Modules
December 14, 2010In 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 ...ASP.NET (MVC) and the Tale of the Continuous Application Restarts
December 10, 2010I 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 ...A Burden Called Meetings
December 9, 2010I’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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 3 : Prototypes
December 4, 2010In 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 ...AutoTest.NET
November 30, 2010I 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 ...Book Review - The Nomadic Developer
November 26, 2010Just 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Threads vs. Events
November 20, 2010In 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 ...The Black Art of P/Invoke and Marshaling in .NET
November 17, 2010Last 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 ...Basic JavaScript Part 2 : Objects
November 13, 2010In 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 ...Taking Baby Steps with Node.js – Introduction
November 8, 2010Like 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 ...Code Retreat Ghent
November 8, 2010Last 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 ...ArrrrCamp - About Ruby, Rails, Radiant and Rum
October 30, 2010Yesterday, I attended ArrrrCamp in Gent together with my former colleague Peter Eysermans. This was my very first Ruby conference although I would argue that the focus was more ...
Read more ...Laborers versus Professionals
October 27, 2010A while ago, my good friend Michel Grootjans tweeted the following: Are developers (a) laborers or (b) professionals? If (a) don't expect them to think. If (b) don't expect the...
Read more ...Basic JavaScript Part 1 : Functions
October 22, 2010Functions 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 ...Book Review: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
October 20, 2010After 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 ...Elegant Documentation Never Lies
October 15, 2010I 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 ...Book Review: jQuery in Action (2nd Edition)
October 15, 2010I 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 ...Book Review: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
August 23, 2010Having 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 ...Book Review: Debug It!
August 18, 2010Throughout 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 ...Book Review: Object-Oriented JavaScript
August 11, 2010A 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 ...
CreateDelegate – An Exercise in Using Expressions
July 30, 2010
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 ...Using TransactionScope with SQLite
July 2, 2010Earlier 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 ...Book Review: Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard
July 2, 2010After 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 ...Enter a Parallel Universe Using IKVM.NET
June 25, 2010IKVM.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 ...Learning JavaScript – Checking The Declaration of a Variable
June 25, 2010Judging 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 ...Book Review: JavaScript – The Good Parts
May 24, 2010Today 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 ...Linfu Duck Typing Part 1 – Revealing Secrets
April 16, 2010Don’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 ...Book Review: ASP.NET MVC in Action
April 9, 2010Earlier 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 ...Don’t Give Up on the State Pattern Just Yet - Revisited
March 27, 2010In 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 ...Don’t Give Up on the State Pattern Just Yet
March 20, 2010Last 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 ...Behaviors with MSpec
February 26, 2010In 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 ...MSpec and Auto Mocking
February 23, 2010In 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 ...Getting Started With Machine.Specifications (MSpec)
February 19, 2010Its 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 ...Is NoSQL Finally Going Mainstream?
February 12, 2010Its 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 ...Integrating ELMAH for a WCF Service
February 5, 2010Peter 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 ...JetBrains Web IDE
January 29, 2010As 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 ...Calling Non-Public Methods
January 28, 2010A 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 ...CSS Basics: The Box Model
January 26, 2010If 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 ...Retrospective of 2009, Planning for 2010
December 30, 2009After 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 ...Taking a Visit To The SUSE Studio
December 19, 2009After 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 ...Review Amazon Kindle DX
November 20, 2009As 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 ...Book Review: Enterprise Service Bus
October 30, 2009About 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 ...Next European VAN on 18 November 2009
October 29, 2009Mark 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 ...Mapping From IDataReader/IDataRecord with AutoMapper
October 16, 2009A 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 ...Exploring NServiceBus
October 9, 2009I'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 ...Next European VAN on 05 October 2009
September 7, 2009Read all about it at the E-VAN blog.
Read more ...Book Review: Enterprise Integration Patterns
August 18, 2009I 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 ...Fluent Domain Methods
August 1, 2009In 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 ...Generic Expression Builder
July 25, 2009I 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 ...NHibernate 2.1 and Collection Event Listeners
July 20, 2009In 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 ...Design Documents in CouchDB and Validation
July 18, 2009To 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 ...Using NHibernate for Legacy Databases
July 13, 2009One 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 ...Views into CouchDB
July 10, 2009To 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 ...Adding Attachments to a Document in CouchDB
July 10, 2009To 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 ...The Europe Virtual ALT.NET Blog
July 8, 2009Colin 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. If y...
Read more ...DELETE Documents from CouchDB
July 3, 2009To 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 ...GETting Documents From CouchDB
July 2, 2009To 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 ...PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room
July 1, 2009In 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 ...Next European VAN on 6th July 2009
June 25, 2009This 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 ...Generic Value Object
June 7, 2009I 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 ...Recording of Udi Dahan on SOA @ E-VAN 01 June 2009
June 5, 2009Udi 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 ...Installing the Couch(DB)
May 30, 2009In 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 ...Relaxing on the Couch(DB)
May 24, 2009The 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 ...Half-a-Book Review: IronRuby in Action
May 18, 2009Earlier 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 ...Next European VAN on 1st June 2009
May 17, 2009This 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 ...Recording of Mark Nijhof on Fubu MVC @ E-VAN 06 May 2009
May 7, 2009Mark 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 ...Next European VAN on 06 May 2009
April 27, 2009This 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 ...Half-a-Book Review: SOA Patterns
April 18, 2009A 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 ...Conditional Using
April 9, 2009Today I found myself writing the following code: private void DoSomething(String userName) { using(var userEntry = GetUserEntryFor(userName)) if(CouldBeFound(userEn...
Read more ...Next European VAN on 14 April 2009
April 8, 2009This 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 ...Experimenting With Fluent Interfaces in the Domain
March 28, 2009As 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 ...Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
March 28, 2009Yesterday, 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 ...About Working With a Shared Database
March 28, 2009I 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 ...One Scenario Where the System.DirectoryServices. AccountManagement API Falls Down
March 22, 2009About 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 ...Progressive Interfaces
March 21, 2009David 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 ...Be Careful With the var Keyword and Expression Builders
March 21, 2009I 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 ...What I Really, Really, Really Like About Using Fluent NHibernate
March 8, 2009Reusable 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 ...How Do I Learn
March 7, 2009You 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 ...Recording of Sebastien Lambla @ E-VAN 25 February 2009
February 26, 2009Great 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 ...Book review: LINQ in Action
February 23, 2009Yesterday 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 ...Next European VAN on 25 February 2009
February 15, 2009This 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 ...Recording of the First European VAN
February 11, 2009Greg 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 ...European Virtual ALT.NET Meeting Rescheduled
February 2, 2009Due 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 ...European Virtual ALT.NET Meeting on 02/02/2009
January 29, 2009The 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 ...Ethics in Software Development: Craftsmanship over Crap
January 11, 2009Robert 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 ...My 100th blog post for 2008
December 31, 2008I'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 ...Hello Real DDD World
December 31, 2008I'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 ...Hello LINQ in .NET 2.0
December 31, 2008When 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 ...Don't Sell Out on the Context, Dude
December 31, 2008I’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 ...Migrating a Versionable ASMX Web Service to WCF
December 21, 2008Creating 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 ...Dutch ALT.NET Meeting - 11 December 2008
December 13, 2008Again 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 ...Learning about StructureMap
December 12, 2008I’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 ...Type Analyzing Blogs
December 2, 2008Ayende 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 ...WCF and Multiple IIS Site Bindings
December 1, 2008We 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 ...Marick's Law
November 29, 2008This 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 ...Professional Under Pressure
November 27, 2008A 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 ...How TFS Lost my Trust
November 26, 2008This 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 ...NHibernate Fact when Saving a Transient Entity with Second Level Caching Enabled.
November 23, 2008After 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 ...Chain of Responsibility Using Castle Windsor and a First Experience With StructureMap - Part 2
November 16, 2008In 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 ...Chain of Responsibility Using Castle Windsor and a First Experience With StructureMap - Part 1
November 16, 2008A 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 ...Book Review : Beyond Code
November 10, 2008I 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 ...Be careful with optional parameters in C# 4.0
November 9, 2008I'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 ...Kaizenconf Part 3 - Taking Action
November 5, 2008The 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 ...Kaizenconf Part 2 - Open Space
November 5, 2008After 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 ...Kaizenconf Part 1 - Workshops
November 5, 2008My 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 ...Attending the Kaizenconf
October 30, 2008Peter 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 ...Refining Context/Specification BDD using Rhino Mocks 3.5
October 25, 2008Earlier 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 ...The Quest for a Personal Information Manager: MyInfo vs Evernote
October 20, 2008I'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 ...Book Review: C# in Depth
October 20, 2008I 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 ...Sins of Commissions
October 12, 2008Reading 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 ...Refactoring Exercise: The Single Responsibility Principle vs Needless Complexity
October 6, 2008Ray 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 ...Book Review: Clean Code
October 2, 2008I 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 ...Properties - A False Sense of Encapsulation
September 26, 2008I'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 ...Little Secret
September 24, 2008I'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 ...Commented-Out Code and Broken Windows
September 21, 2008I 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 ...Book Review: Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
September 20, 2008I 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 ...Learn Many Architectures, and Choose Among Them
September 15, 2008I'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 ...Ventilation of Thoughts
September 7, 2008Earlier 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 ...Book Review: Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#
August 30, 2008I 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 ...What's Wrong with a Data-Driven Approach?
August 29, 2008Suppose 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 ...Decoupled Domain Models
August 26, 2008On 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 ...Three years ago ...
August 25, 2008... 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 ...NHibernate 2.0 went gold!
August 25, 2008Yesterday 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 ...My New Home Developer Rig
August 15, 2008I 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 ...The Onion Architecture
July 29, 2008This 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 ...A Professional Software Developer Never Says ...
July 28, 2008"Let us cleanup and fix this code later so we can meet our deadline".
Read more ...Three Qualities that Every Piece of Code Should Have ...
July 28, 2008It 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 ...Windows Vista vs Windows Server 2008 (Workstation)
July 24, 2008Last 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 ...Binsor : The Castle Windsor XML Configuration Killer
July 18, 2008As 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 ...It's the little things
July 17, 2008A 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 ...Integrating Castle Windsor and NHibernate with WCF - Throwing the WCF facility and some Rhino Tools in the mix
July 14, 2008A 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 ...Book review: Code Leader - Using People, Tools and Processes to Build Successful Software
July 12, 2008Like 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 ...Dutch ALT.NET User Group
July 4, 2008Yesterday, 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 ...Active Conventions with NDepend - Part Deux
July 2, 2008I 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 ...Active Conventions with NDepend
June 28, 2008Some 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 ...The Entity Framework Team are Real Professionals
June 27, 2008You 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 ...Book review: NHibernate in Action
June 14, 2008Writing 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 ...Annoying Bug in Visual Studio 2005
June 5, 2008Today 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 ...NDepend - Static Analysis Made in Heaven
June 2, 2008What 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 ...The Future of .NET
June 2, 2008That'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 ...Peter works on the web!
May 27, 2008It 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 ...I'm on ...
May 21, 2008... Twitter. Why? Because all the cool kids are doing it ;-) (yep, I have no spine). Let's see where this goes.
Read more ...Integrating Castle Windsor and NHibernate with WCF
May 18, 2008Up 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 ...Implementing NHibernate Interceptors
May 15, 2008One 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 ...WCF friction
May 13, 2008Today 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 ...On Persistence
May 1, 2008Earlier 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 ...Test Data Builders Refined
April 26, 2008Last 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 ...Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer
April 16, 2008I 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 ...NHibernate 2.0 and Cascading Deletes
April 12, 2008The 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 ...Castle Windsor vs writing your own
April 4, 2008Earlier 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 ...On Windows Workflow and Biztalk
April 4, 2008From 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 ...I'm on Elegant Code
April 1, 2008David 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 ...I've won!
March 30, 2008The 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 ...Castle Dynamic Proxy
March 30, 2008This 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 ...Sweet NUnit Integration in TeamCity
March 7, 2008I 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 ...Book review: The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming
March 6, 2008This 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 ...Daily Stand-up Meetings
March 2, 2008I 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 ...Behavior Driven Development on ALT.NET
March 1, 2008There'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 ...On Software Factories
February 23, 2008Bart 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 ...How Microsoft is solving yesterday's problems
February 21, 2008There'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 ...From Space Shuttle to Software
February 21, 2008This 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 ...DirectoryEntry Close vs Dispose
February 19, 2008While 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 ...Directory Programming with System.DirectoryServices. AccountManagement
February 10, 2008Last 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 ...Treat Warnings as Errors
February 7, 2008This 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 ...Exploring BDD style specifications as a better TDD
February 3, 2008You 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 ...Using NCover/NCoverExplorer from MsBuild
February 1, 2008In 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 ...Code Coverage with TeamCity
January 25, 2008In 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 ...TeamCity Continuous Integration & Build Management is really awesome
January 23, 2008I'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 ...AutoMocking Container
January 13, 2008When 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 ...Total Commander Rocks!
January 8, 2008I'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 ...Test Data Builder
December 23, 2007A 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 ...Why O Why - The Day after
December 2, 2007Alex 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 ...Why O Why
December 1, 2007Glenn 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 ...Misconceptions about Agile Programming
November 29, 2007This 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 ...Design and Evolution of C++
November 29, 2007Driving 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 ...Book review: Working Effectively with Legacy Code
November 27, 2007There 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 ...Design by Contract - The Sequel
November 20, 2007In 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 5
November 14, 2007The 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 4
November 13, 2007Windows 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 3
November 13, 2007LINQ 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 2
November 12, 2007Secure 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 1
November 11, 2007Soma 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 ...TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona - Day 0
November 11, 2007We 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 ...Design by contract
October 24, 2007Something 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 ...ASP.NET MVC Framework at ALT.NET Conf
October 6, 2007Scott 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 ...Test Data Builder versus Object Mother
September 30, 2007When 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 ...Article on Dependency Injection
September 29, 2007Mark 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 ...Bug Driven Development
September 24, 2007Are 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 ...A day of great quotes
September 10, 2007Scott 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 ...Improving Applications Design with a Rich Domain Model
September 2, 2007This 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 ...Community efforts
September 1, 2007I'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 ...The Myth of Software Estimation
August 29, 2007Just 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 ...Tools, tools, tools and ... tools
August 24, 2007A 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 ...Discipline
August 15, 2007Another 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 ...Me like CruiseControl.NET
July 29, 2007One 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 ...I Hate SSIS
July 24, 2007Check 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 ...Book review: Windows Developer Power Tools
July 23, 2007Over 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 ...TDD through the eyes of Jeremy D. Miller
July 23, 2007Another 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 ...Dynamic Language Runtime
July 22, 2007Earlier 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 ...101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed
July 17, 2007This 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 ...Read "Beautiful Code" and make this a better world
July 12, 2007Good 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 ...Agile Team Dynamics
July 10, 2007If 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 ...FCL Type Names
July 8, 2007After 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 ...How to read a book
June 25, 2007Charles 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 ...My programmer personality type is ... DHTB
June 8, 2007You'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 ...ALT.NET - Summary
June 5, 2007Great 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 ...Persistence Ignorance. Finally!
June 5, 2007Daniel 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 ...My advice to Jamie
May 31, 2007It 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 ...You're not alone
May 30, 2007It 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 ...Resharper dude
May 21, 2007Over 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 ...Is Microsoft losing the Alpha Geeks?
May 21, 2007The 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 ...NUnit vs Team System Unit Test
May 15, 2007At 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 ...Agile is just human nature
May 12, 2007I 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 ...Exploring WCF - The Close vs Abort confusion
May 9, 2007In 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 ...A Browser Tale
May 7, 2007I'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 ...ALT.NET
May 4, 2007After 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 ....NET Domain-Driven Design with C#: Problem-Design-Solution
April 27, 2007A 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 ...Why Accurate Estimations Are Just Not Possible
April 20, 2007This is both funny and true.
Read more ...NUnit 2.4 constraints
April 13, 2007The 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 ...Build a solid core
April 8, 2007Essential 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 ...Developer & IT Pro Days 2007
March 30, 2007Great 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 ...Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 - Pre-Conference
March 27, 2007I 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 ...Developer & IT Pro Days 2007
March 26, 2007I'll be attending the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007. Hope to meet you there ...
Read more ...Thrill seekers and Fear avoiders
March 16, 2007From my previous post, you can guess that I'm definitely a Thrill seeker. What kind of developer/person are you?
Read more ...ASP.NET Model-View-Controller Framework
March 16, 2007This 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 ...Persistence Ignorance
March 15, 2007The 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 ...The Underlying Problems of TDD in the .NET World
March 8, 2007This 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 ...Domain-Driven Design
March 7, 2007I'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 ...A lean mean blogging machine
March 6, 2007I'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 ...Version 2.0 of the ISO C++ Standard
February 14, 2007Although 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 ...What's Wrong with ASP.NET (bis)
February 3, 2007Another 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 ...Once Upon a Team
January 31, 2007Great 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 ...What's wrong with ASP.NET
January 30, 2007While 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 ...Maintainable code
January 26, 2007A 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 ...Which .NET Framework exceptions to throw?
January 22, 2007A 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 ...The Anti Team
January 22, 2007Another 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 ...NDoc 2.0 Alpha vs Sandcastle
January 19, 2007I 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 ...VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta
December 23, 2006It'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 ...System.Configuration 2.0
December 15, 2006Today 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 ...WCF Coding Standard
December 5, 2006While 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 ...Learning from your own stupidities
November 15, 2006Today 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 ...The Cost of GUIDs as Primary Keys
October 24, 2006Today 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 ...To test or ... to test?
October 7, 2006I 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 ...Threading support from Microsoft
September 1, 2006I 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 ...I Hate Visual SourceSafe
August 16, 2006Jeff 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 ...What's new in System.Xml 2.0?
August 6, 2006The 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 ...Jamie has done it again ...
August 3, 2006What happens when my favorite VS.NET add-in meets with my favorite .NET tool? Pure horse power baby!! Watch the demo here.
Read more ...Books, books, books ... so many books
July 22, 2006I 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 ...The case against catch(Exception ex)
June 15, 2006You 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 ...Management and Engineers
April 30, 2006A 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 ...History of the C family of languages
January 16, 2006Billy Hollis posted a short history of the C family of languages. My favorite programming language family. Enjoy!
Read more ...Debug.Assert in ASP.NET 2.0
January 14, 2006Finally, 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 ...Rebase all your library assemblies
November 5, 2005Back 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 ...pdb-only debug information option
September 3, 2005In 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 ...IXmlSerializable interface fully available in .NET 2.0
August 31, 2005The .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 ...Start
August 21, 2005Een memorabele dag vandaag: mijn allereerste blog! Ik zal hier een varieteit aan onderwerpen ‘bloggen’ maar hoofdzakelijk over software ontwikkeling allerhande. Deze postings za...
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About
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.
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Contract Tests - Parameterised Test Cases
June 28, 2023
Contract Tests - Abstract Test Cases
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Contract Tests
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