Development Central

I’ve started using Sandboxie on my system as another line of defense. Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcast turned me on to it. I haven’t used it long enough to swear by it, but I think it’s a good idea.

Update - February 26, 2009

I’m liking this program. I’ve got both Firefox and Thunderbird running in the sandbox now, with the contents automatically deleting when no program is running. Email, bookmarks, etc. are persistent (there are handy options for these), and Sandboxie prompts to persist files saved to the desktop. I’ve hidden several directories from the sandboxed programs completely. The browser and email client automatically run sandboxed regardless of how I launch them (even with Launchy).

It takes a small amount of getting used to. I saved an attachment to a non-persistent directory and almost forgot about it prior to cleaning the sandbox (since it doesn’t prompt for unspecified directories). By default the VPN client my work uses didn’t work with IE in the sandbox (but it’s probably doable with some configuration). Apparently iTunes can override Sandboxie somehow - clicking on a Podcast link brought up some interesting dialogs. But other than these, I haven’t run into any significant issue with Sandboxie. It works.

(Continuing Pragmatism over Principles)

“The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles. It became a rigid set of new rules—the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.”

- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Saying that it’s OK not to care about quality and that there is no need to study the collected wisdom of experienced developers is an affront to my professional ethics. It is equating mediocre programmers with those who care about craftsmanship. It denigrates our profession and ourselves.

This is the same idea that Rand rails against - that the common man, following his simple platitudes, can achieve the same results as the person who has strived, studied, tested, challenged, and continuously improved for years can achieve. There is no concept of excellence. Choosing between two possibilities is simply a matter of opinion - there is no objective validation that says, “this method is better.”

To be fair, this does bring up questions of measurements, metrics, and results. A good developer must deliver working software that meets the customer’s needs. Doing so without principles, though, is unethical, unprofessional, and foolish.

This may be SharePoint 101 for gurus, but this is for non-experts like me.

If you are trying to reorganize Shared Documents on a SharePoint site, there’s an easier way than doing it through the web interface.

Option one:

Start/Run \\sharepoint.domain.com\site
(basically change the HTTP www to two backslashes).

Option two:

Go to My Network Places and map the drive.

Either way, you can use Windows Explorer to move documents around.

Your mileage may vary; I strongly suggest you check with your SharePoint administrator before trying this tip.

Update - April 13, 2009

Our administrator imposed a document size limit on SharePoint. Uploading a larger document through a browser errors out with a descriptive message. Copying a file through Windows Explorer appeared to silently corrupt it. When in doubt, verify (and keep a copy!).

Hanselman List of Podcasts for .NET Programmers

There are even more podcasts mentioned in the comments. I found this an incredibly useful resource.

Atwood and Spolsky are digging their hole deeper:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001225.html

Be sure to read Uncle Bob’s posts on the matter:

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/01/31/quality-doesnt-matter-that-much-jeff-and-joel

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/06/on-open-letter-to-joel-spolsky-and-jeff-atwood

I’m heavily on Bob Martin’s side in this. I’ve read Clean Code, and Martin’s clearly earned his chops.

While I agree that one can use Agile techniques to achieve good OO design, it’s extremely helpful to know what good design looks like.

I’ve worked with unprincipled pragmatists. The git-r-done philosophy leads to unmaintainable code. I’m a huge fan of Agile/XP, but XP takes discipline. If you don’t care about software craftsmanship, you’re in the wrong profession.

I’m tired of bloggers throwing out controversial topics to increase readership. I read some bozo the other day who had a post on 10 reasons why .NET sucks. (The ICloneable interface is the only one that’s meaningful, and he misspelled that.)

Hey! Morons! Why don’t you take a lesson from Uncle Bob and try to impart actual information to your readers?

And since I’m just ranting and haven’t really taught you anything, I’ll shut up now.

P.S. Would you buy a house designed by an architect who didn’t follow any principles, but had a vague methodology that guided him most of the time? Beck wouldn’t put up with that; don’t call it Agile.

Update - February 13, 2009

Uncle Bob posted the definitive statement on the meaning of “principle".

Update - February 14, 2009

Here’s Palermo weighing in on this.

Update - February 17, 2009

Pragmatism over Principles II

JetBRAINS finally fixed a long-standing limitation in ReSharper - the test runner ignored NUnit’s SetUpFixture attribute. (It’s supposed to be fixed in the current build, at least.)

http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-40575

I used these today to create a state machine diagram, and they worked reasonably well:

Visio Stencil and Template for UML 2.0

MEF - Managed Extensibility Framework with Glenn Block on Hanselminutes.

This is an excellent talk. Block’s a great speaker, and he hits all the important points.

The interview really cleared up a lot of misunderstandings I had about MEF, and it made me feel much better about the direction Microsoft is taking it. I especially liked the possibility of better interaction with Unity in the future.

Highly recommended.