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Your Development Environment

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Colin Ramsay

When I first started working in “the real world”, I had a development environment which I’d describe as typical: average Dell computer and peripherals, one monitor, Windows XP with all my applications installed, including VS2003 and VS2005. I’m sure Last … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Design Dithering

Posted on June 2, 2008 by Colin Ramsay

When you break out of the “new programmer” mindset and begin thinking in terms of organisation, patterns, and good design, I think there’s a real danger of hitting a development wall. What actually is the correct way of implementing a … Continue reading →

Posted in practices pragmatism | 4 Comments

Javascript Patterns & Practices

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Colin Ramsay

My previous post on Javascript gave an insight into using the language in a more structured manner than you may have been used to in the past. I’m going to talk about a few more methods which I use a … Continue reading →

Posted in javascript, practices | 1 Comment

You Have Nothing To Fear From Javascript

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

Building a web application consists of a number of discrete layers: server code, client code, HTML, and styling. If you cannot sit down with one of those layers and work on it, you are not fulfilling your role. If I … Continue reading →

Posted in javascript | 9 Comments

Working with Interfaces Part Three – Windsor

Posted on November 21, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

Castle Windsor is an Inversion of Control container which uses interfaces as a key concept. When working in the manner I described in my previous articles on interfaces, you get a decoupled application but may end up with a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Working with Interfaces Part Two – Decoupling

Posted on October 9, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

In the first part of this mini-series I talked about the basic use of interfaces, which is to provide a contract for your developers to work to. In this part, I’m going to try and demonstrate how interfaces can be … Continue reading →

Posted in c# practices interfaces | 7 Comments

Why ALT.NET?

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

DISCLAIMER: This post was inspired by, and contains material from, a recent post on my personal blog entitled “Abandon ALT.NET“. For a few months the term “ALT.NET” has been gaining traction on the blogs I read, starting from a post by … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Working with Interfaces Part One – Contracts

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

I hold my hands up – I am a programmer who doesn’t have a computer science background. My education only skimmed programming and was totally bereft of any architectural considerations. I almost stumbled into my first programming job, and I … Continue reading →

Posted in c# | 5 Comments

Coding C# in Style

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Colin Ramsay

I admit it; I’ve got problems. I get itchy when my code isn’t arranged in the right order, I get the shakes when I open a file and see code sprawling all over the place, I get nervous when my … Continue reading →

Posted in c#, resharper, style guidelines | 10 Comments