Development Central

I’m back from Software Craftsmanship North America. It was an excellent convention with some exceptional speakers, and was a tremendous bargain. Kudos to the organizers!

Ken Auer’s opening keynote was the only significant sour note in the entire day-long event. “Uncle” Bob Martin more than made up for it in his closing keynote - he stoked the fires and challenged us.

It was my great pleasure to meet Ward Cunningham. He reminded me of Steve Wozniak (whom I’ve never met) - he’s a Hacker in the best sense, still innovating after all these years. He’s clearly in the Ri stage; he can (and does) make his own rules.

To everyone I met, thank you for sharing your insights!

Update - August 29, 2009

I finished typing up my notes! :) They are available online at: Notes index

I’m off to Software Craftsmanship North America in Chicago tomorrow (the conference is Wednesday). Say hi to the bald guy in the black T-shirt!

Earlier I was tempted to post something about the barrier to entry in certain communities (open source projects, a certain auction site, and now Stack Overflow), but I think I just broke through the latter one. And now I’m starting to get addicted.

Stack Overflow is a site where programmers can ask and answer questions. It’s like a modern version of Usenet. It has sister sites for other types of questions (see the FAQ).

The initial barrier to entry is that it requires an OpenID account. This is free, if somewhat cryptic. After that, the issue is reputation.

You need reputation points to do anything besides asking and answering questions. In particular, voting up or down on answers requires a certain reputation level (again, see the FAQ). In practice this means that you’ll want to answer a few questions (and answer them correctly and completely) to accumulate some points.

Somewhat more annoying are the hidden requirements. I had typed up a careful answer to one post, and it was refused - I had more than one hyperlink in it. New members are restricted to a single link per answer. (Fortunately it allows you to edit your response and resubmit it.) I tried to answer several questions in succession, and had to wait three minutes between posts (again, because I was new). Presumably these are anti-spam tactics, but it would be nice if they were clearly spelled out.

Once you start answering some questions and gaining reputation, though, the addiction can strike. Wow - if I get 100, I can Vote Down! Were there any easy ones just posted? Any in my areas of expertise?

The tagging system is nice. It lets you quickly find questions in a given category. You can see the newest questions, unanswered questions, etc. Note that even answered questions may be worth looking at; you can always expand upon (or correct) the existing responses.

Somewhat annoying, a bit insular, but definitely worth a look.

P.S. I’m on as TrueWill.

Several interesting items:

• Iowa Code Camp is coming up in November; they currently have a call for speakers. I hope to be able to attend!
• Red Gate Software posted a free PDF of the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference! How cool is that? We use their SQL Prompt at work for IntelliSense in SQL Server Management Studio; it’s amazing. They also posted the .NET Reflector FAQ; especially note the section on .NET 3.5 decompilation support.
• I’m finding the LINQ Pocket Reference very handy, along with its companion tool LINQPad. The latter is useful for all sorts of quick spikes, not just testing LINQ.
• Check the installed .NET version with the .NET Version Detector.
• CodeSmith reports on the Visual Studio Silent Death Bug. I’ve encountered the bug in VS after installing the most recent version of CodeSmith, but have not tried the fix yet.
• Remember that you can use C# 3.0 extension methods to add behavior to interfaces! This tip is from Bill Wagner’s excellent book More Effective C#.
• Ever wondered How to Share Data Between Stored Procedures in T-SQL? I didn’t know about the INSERT-EXEC trick.
• Learn about using XPath on XML columns in SQL Server 2005.

I’m working on a small project at home, and I decided to add a custom configuration section to the App.config. If it weren’t for Derik Whittaker’s article (thanks Derik!), it’s unlikely that I would have figured it out.

So after importing one reference (System.configuration), descending from three different classes, overriding two methods, applying two attributes (one of them multiple times), making multiple casts, and repeatedly hardcoding the same strings, I can now parse six lines of XML.

It would be simpler to write a custom class and use LINQ to XML to load it. This is absurd.

An important update to an older post:
Remote GAC issue

Thanks to this article at Elegant Code, I found the EQATEC Profiler for .NET.

It’s free (BSD licensed) and it works (it’s not just for CF); we’ve used it to help tune real-world WinForms applications at work. It provides only basic features, but they’re professionally implemented. (Note that it’s not a memory profiler.)

For teams on a budget, this is definitely worth a look. Just remember that premature optimization is evil.