A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer
After hearing so many developers complain that they wouldn’t be able to code without Visual Studio/Resharper/CodeRush/Intellisense/Source Control IDE Integration/WYSIWYG editors/<Insert Random Tool Here /> , I thought it would be useful to find out how dependent I was on similar tooling. Do I honestly need all the features offered by a “modern” IDE? Are these [...]
In the past I’ve been a fairly big advocate of the Microsoft Report Viewer control for accessing SQL Server Reporting Services reports from within a web application, simply because it allows authentication to be proxied through the host application (so you can use a service account to talk to reporting services and control security through [...]
Today I was helping out one of my colleagues with a particularly annoying InfoPath problem; he wanted to enable the multi-line option for a text box bound to a web service, but whenever he did the read-only option would automatically trigger. Truly frustrating. Not being one to believe that things are impossible, I decided to [...]
As I’ve previously mentioned, as of October 1st 2008 MSDN subscribers who have previously only had access to Visual Studio Team System Development Edition can now also use Database Edition. The reasoning behind this move has now been made clear thanks to the January MSDN Subscription Newsletter: In the next release of Visual Studio Team [...]
Generic error messages are high on my list of pet peeves. Being told that “an error occurred” may be something that you can pass off in a line of business application, especially if the actual error message gets emailed to the help desk or something similar, but it is totally unacceptable in a product targeted [...]
Picking an appropriate version of Visual Studio Team System for your team to use has always been an interesting proposition. The full Team Suite edition is outside the price range of most projects, and you have to make sure that the majority of your team will be able to see all of the artifacts with [...]
Until recently I honestly didn’t “get” the Twitter phenomenon. I figured that it would be chock full of people posting about what they had for lunch, or other such inane comments. There are quite a few excellent articles that go some way to refute this by pointing out the power of choosing who to follow, but [...]
After the success of her first programming lesson, my 5 year old daughter was eager to start the next one. Previously we had covered boolean logic and control flow, both of which she had no trouble with, so she was ready for something slightly more complex. I had a few ideas about what to talk [...]
There are certain important life skills that parents are obligated to instill upon their children. It’s our responsibility to make sure that our kids have a have well developed I/O skills, a strong moral backbone, a social conscience and, most importantly, that they know how to program. My 5 year old girl recently started inquiring [...]
How many times have you heard that a tool will save you heaps of time because it automatically generates some sort of CRUD layer for you? Depending on how good you’ve been for Santa you could get a generated data layer, service layer or even an entire application. Great! More time for coffee! Well, yes [...]