Author: Cory Foy

“My favorite tdd life story is last fall when we were putting a large plastic sheet down on our porch (didn’t have time to seal it), and I let my girlfriend work on it for a while. She had started by stapling one end down, then slowly moving down the porch, stapling each side. What…

Brady Gaster found an interesting comparison of the features of various databases, including MSSQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, MySQL and oracle. Pretty good stuff.

I just got back from a trip to South Florida. My wife and I are both from Tampa, and both of our families (and most of our friends) still live there, so we go down quite a bit. This trip I headed down with my brother and stepdad to my stepdad’s girlfriend’s family reunion in…

(Short list this week as I am heading down to South Florida in the morning. Have a safe Labor Day!) “My finest moment was estimating stories with a team in “number of tests”. We took one iteration’s worth of work, did a quick design by layer, then estimated the whole thing at about 275 programmer…

In a recent post to the XP mailing list, Adrian Howard said: Many people seem to have a great deal of trouble going “meta” with mistakes. People will happily write code, discover it has bugs, spend half an hour with debugger finding bugs, fix bugs and repeat without ever saying to themselves “Is there a…

Brian Slesinsky posted a nice lightweight approach on the XP list about running servlets in the same process as JUnit using Jetty: One lightweight approach that most people don’t seem to know about is using Jetty to run servlets in the same process as JUnit. Jetty has a much nicer internal API than Tomcat. After…

Weekly Nuggets: – “Quality in real money terms (and that is the way we keep score in business) is the inverse of the expense of technical support. If technical support is a profit center, then quality in the terms you think about normally are inverted. Therefore, if you wish to have high quality, you should…

When you are running an assembly test in NUnit, you may need to access App.Config values. NUnit loads the App.config files by looking for a file with AssemblyName.config. However, in the default configuration, that .config file has to be in the same directory as the .nunit project file. For example, we had the following setup:…

Today I was looking for a simple way to apply an XSL stylesheet to an XML document. I didn’t want resolvers, files, or anything like that. I wanted to take an XSL string and an XML string, and apply it to get the output. I started to play around with the System.Xml stuff, and then…

More tasty nuggets from the past week: “By this point the users will probably be fed up of trying to work around the restrictions and will start texting people from their cell phones.” (Keith Bucher – Security Focus Security Basics mailing list) “So the short answer is that I don’t expect to see consistent application…