Category: General

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…

Last week, our team made the decision to start using Subversion. Previously we had been using CVS – sort of. Some of our team were actually using Visual Source Safe, and then checking in their code every couple of days to CVS. In addition, we had no real development tree in CVS. Our network admin…

John Carter of Tait Electronics in New Zealand recently posted to the XP list his implementation of a Universal Unit Test in Ruby. Because the files section of the XP list is kind of hard to get to, I agreed to host it here on the site. Here’s the original post: My TDD, DRY, YAGNI,…

I realized this week that with all the mailing lists and web sites I come across a ton of “nuggets” of goodness each week. I am going to start summarizing some of the good ones on Fridays here. This weeks covers everything from TDD to Haikus and Linux Audio: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CollectingSeashells “You have no authority. You…

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of frustration at work. I feel like we have some just great developers, but because we are in a transition to becoming a small company from a startup, there isn’t a lot of structure. This leads to a lot of duplication, and not a lot…

After many weeks of debating with myself, and several low turnout meetings, and discussion on the mailing list, I have decided to cut back the CharJUG meetings to once a quarter. Even bringing Andy Hunt and Gavin King down wasn’t enough to spark interest in this banking town. September’s meeting with Patrick Linskey on Java…

Ron Jeffries made an excellent point tonight on the Extreme Programming list: I’d wager that your company has a number of practices around thetopic of “change control”, and terms in its contracts regardingchange. If I won that wager, I’d then ask: why do you have thosepractices and terms if you really believe that you’ll get…