Monthly Archives: January 2008

Some C# obscurities

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I’m sure everyone’s tired of hearing about C# 3.0 features like lambda expressions, extension methods, anonymous types and so on.  Before you fall in love with the new features, there are a few oldies-but-goodies that revolve around the “?” character.  … Continue reading →

Posted in C# | 6 Comments

Best tool for the job

Posted on January 28, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I’m not sure if this is a trap, but I find myself doing this more and more.  Let’s say you have a short (less than 2 weeks) project to work on, and maybe it’s for a church website or something … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile, Tools | 19 Comments

WatiN and INamingContainer adventures

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I decided to add a simple WatiN acceptance test today to validate our login page.  When a user enters invalid credentials, the page should show an error message. To test this, I need to set the text of the username … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET, Testing | 2 Comments

Some essential Visual Studio tools

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

Visual Studio for me personally is tough to use without some essential tools and add-ins installed.  Having recently set up a dev machine, I became keenly aware of the pain of using a clean installation of Visual Studio.  So I … Continue reading →

Posted in Tools | 4 Comments

Notes from the Austin DDD Book Club

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

We had our first meeting of the Austin DDD (Domain-Driven Design) Book Club today, and I thought it went well for a first meeting.  The book club was created because a few of us noticed at the Austin altnetconf that … Continue reading →

Posted in Austin DDD Book Club | 4 Comments

Customer-facing identifiers

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I’m still installing miscellaneous drivers for my work laptop (Dell Inspiron 1501).  I just downloaded an additional printer driver for an office printer, but can anyone tell me in less than 5 seconds, without Googling, which file is the printer … Continue reading →

Posted in Domain-Driven Design | 1 Comment

Advanced CI: integrating web applications

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

So you’ve already got an automated build with unit tests and deployment packaging.  But if you have a Web Application project as part of your solution, there is still the potential for some compilation errors to get past your builds.  … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET, Continuous Integration | 4 Comments

Abusing using statements

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I’ve always thought that the using statement was one of the most useful features included in C#.  It’s easy to use: public string GetFileTextForParsing(string path) { string contents = null; using(StreamReader reader = File.OpenText(path)) { contents = reader.ReadToEnd(); } return … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, MVC | 7 Comments

Making the permanent move

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

I’m getting pretty tired of cross-posting, so I’m making the permanent move over to Los Techies.  After all, if I get a free t-shirt: Then the least I can do is stop dipping my toe in the pool and just … Continue reading →

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

Starting a new gig

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Jimmy Bogard

A few months ago, Jeffrey Palermo approached me at an AgileATX meeting to join him at Headspring Systems.  After much cajoling and intimidation (Jeff’s a big guy), I accepted the offer, and today I started my new job.  Headspring Systems … Continue reading →

Posted in Misc | 11 Comments