As given to the Sacramento .NET Users Group meeting on Oct 28, 2011

This is crazy! I'm trying to uninstall Microsoft Expression Studio 3 from my VMWare. It's been running for nearly three hours! Most of that time it has been in the Kernel. What's up with this? I don't remember it taking this long to install in the first place… :-(

I can’t recommend volunteering enough. It was just a small amount of extra work, but the payoff was the best. There was a shorter registration line for volunteers. But the dinner this evening was what tipped the balance. I’ll get to that.

Coffee: there was plenty of it, but they seemed to have a sweetener shortage. A couple of sugar packets were procured, through means I wish not to know.

Big lines in front of the vendors tents with the coolest stuff and bigger giveaways. Unsurprising and unavoidable. One must collect ALL THE THINGS.

First session of the day for me: How to Break Into Mobile App Development. Delivered quite well, this talk would have been better titled How to Break Into a Mobile App Development Job. The course description made that clear. Why did I take this instead of The Best HTML5 Tools You're Not Using? I don’t...

I put some thoughts about justifying the adoption of good architecture into a comment on LinkedIn, in the .NET Professional group. You may have to join the group to read it.

How is your VB6/.NET code going to "hack it" when you need a web/mobile/cloud app?

I have updated some snippets that I use quite a lot when I want to add an event to a class.

You can download the VSI file from CodeCharm.com.

I tend to be a little lazy. Hey, I’m a programmer! I will work very hard to make sure that I don’t have to do anything automatable more than once.

Anyway, I rely on the compiler to tell me when I’m doing something that isn’t allowed. My compiler let me down. And I suffered through a couple of hours of a very weird problem.

I had been trying out a new model for user interfaces on the Windows Phone 7, and part of that model relies on some interfaces using generics. I’m a big fan of generics – they help me avoid boxing/unboxing, keep strongly-typed collections and so on. The model is multi-platform; it’s the basis for programs that I intend to deploy on Windows, Windows Presentation Framework, Web, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7 platforms.

And… I use ReSharper a lot. It’s a fantastic tool, and I wish I’d been using it a long time ago.

So when ReSharper suggested that I refactor...

Looks like I had my VS not completely connected to the TFS server. Poking around at the Credential Manager, the TFS Administration Console, and the VS Team Explorer connections seems to have cleared it all up. I was able to successfully get Moq installed using NuGet into my test project.

Trying out Team Foundation Software and the Agile MSF thingy that comes with it.

Problem right now? I’m trying to do TDD, and create a new pattern. (Because I can! Stop asking questions!)

So I need to create a mock. I would like to use Moq. I’ve used NMock before, but Moq seems to have a stronger following.

Problem? I’m also using NuGet to get Moq installed into the project. And I get this fun, unhelpful message:



“persons” is the name of the server.

Yes, I...

Micro review of MSDN Magazine, June 2011 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh227291.aspx

Editor's Note: The Best of Times

I agree that there is still much more to come as a developer. Things are really starting to get kind of mature. Is this the golden age of development? Maybe. Only history will know for sure.

Cutting Edge: Invariants and Inheritance in Code Contracts

Using Contracts sounds like it would be a key part of good Domain Driven Design (DDD) which also sounds like it is the methodology to use for modeling complex business scenarios. Invariants are key to making sure that objects are always in a valid state. I remember reading early MFC samples that did this explicitly; at the entry to every method was an Assert that the object was in a known good state.

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Reading on Safari (thank you, mobile version on Windows Phone 7!)



So far… it’s helpful as an introductory text.

 

Reading in print: Visual Studio Magazine (http://visualstudiomagazine.com/) 6 Tips of Separation: Take ViewModel for a Spin and Unit Test Your Silverlight Apps by Benjamin Day Good arguments for MVVM, but a little light on Adapter implementation (not sure his implementation is quite how Adapter should be used) which is the primary test target. Also a little light on how this will be used in more complex scenarios.

Improve Authentication with Windows Identity Foundation  by Peter Vogel Good starting points for introducing WIF into your apps.

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