Category: General

A common complaint I hear in the field (and see on the mailing lists) is that when you do a Get from TFS, the file’s timestamps are set to whatever time you pulled it down. This is likely fine for most people, but some systems rely on the times matching what was on the server…

Last night I presented at the Tampa IASA meeting on a topic called “Getting Unstuck: Working with Legacy Code and Data”. It was basically a combination of Working Effectively with Legacy Code and Refactoring Databases for Software Architects. The presentation went really well – especially because so many of the points hit close to home….

Next week I’m speaking at a Tampa IASA meeting about approaching legacy code as architects. In getting ready for it, I was rereading some articles by Scott Ambler when I came across the following quote: An interesting observation is that when you take a big design up front (BDUF) approach to development where your database…

Here in the US, Thursday is the day we celebrate Thanksgiving. It seems to be a great excuse to have the family over, overindulge in food, and then have good conversations (or listen to the football broadcaster’s conversation). For us, we’ll be having lots of family over, and it should be a good time. But…

11/14/07 – Updated to fix a problem where Windows Live Writer didn’t upload the whole article At the end of the last post, we had automated tests in place that showed our business logic correctly triggered a window to open, and that the UI implemented the logic correctly. However, that window didn’t do much of…

So we demo’d the application for our customer, and he liked the direction so far. It wasn’t much functionality, but it did confirm that it was what he wanted. He would like to see the Account screens finished so that he can try out entering accounts with all of their data. So that’s what we’ll…

In our last section, we put together a list of accounts and made sure we could search them in the way our customer wanted. To recap, our customer needed a way to enter in accounts and be able to search them by phone number or name. From a UI perspective, this should be accomplished using…

As I stated in the introduction, we’re building an app for my father-in-law who runs a small appliance repair business. His biggest pain point is that he captures all of his customer data on paper invoices, and so has no easy way to look up customer information. So his first need was a way to…

When you do any kind of computer work – or really do anything where you have a specific skill – you get asked to do some “family work”. This is usually some family member that needs something done to their computer, or something else, and wants you to do it for them. In our family,…

A question came up on the TDD mailing list earlier this week – how do you deal with an application that closes your memory stream before you have a chance to assert what is going on with it? The solution the poster did was to have a byte array and have a stream on that….