IF you can keep your curly braces when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming bugs on you, If you can write symmetrical code branches, And eliminate the duplication that they reveal; If you can remain positive in your conditions, And know when to switch to a switch, And when to eliminate branching with […]
I get annoyed by articles that generalise by role or job title. The inane “developers are better than programmers”, or “software engineers vs software developers”, or even “software developers can’t lead your test automation efforts”. The reason I dislike such rubbish is I work with people. When you work with people, and recognise the humanity, […]
I have found that Activity Monitor can have a habit of bugging out on you when you try to get recent expensive queries. If you also get this, you may want to try the following query instead. You can adjust the query purposefully by changing the ordering, based on what you are looking for. There […]
I have run a good number of coding dojos, and paricipated in plenty of them too. The most common errors I have found can be classified as: Trying to find abstractions to early Drastic code changes under the banner of “refactoring” Both of these problems are solved by practicing the discipline of TDD according to […]
SpecFlow is the defacto BDD tool for .NET programmers – and if you are using both SpecFlow and Visual Studio Team Services then this article is for you. There is a new VSTS extension called SpecFlow+LivingDoc that provides a simple build task that will generate documentation from your feature files. Here is a quick run-down […]
We use live monitoring of our website pages, and of our website components, to find performance problems in our application. This means we know why our web application is slow as soon as anything breaches a threshold. Very often, we find something that is draining too much CPU from our servers. Brains are a bit […]
The development of your career is, of course, entirely up to you. You need to go out and learn things that are valuable in the marketplace whatever you intend to do in the next few years. The alternative is to give up learning and rust away to nothing. From the perspective of an organisation, there […]
When your body detects an infection, it will kick off an immune response that fights the infection with white blood cells (macrophages). If this doesn’t solve the problem, your body upgrades the response to white blood cells called T and B lymphocytes. Interestingly, there are two jobs undertaken by these two kinds of white blood […]
Following on from a series of recent Windows Updates, a couple of our servers had a problem running Server Manager (“Server Manager has stopped working”) and SQL Management Studio (“Failed to Load penimc.dll”). The details of the Server Manager error were in the event log: Application: ServerManager.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated […]
I was listening to someone talking about being agile and lean in software development. The conversation was very interesting, but there was an underlying theme of urgency and efficiency that I found troubling. There is nothing wrong with delivering quickly, but we should never forget that “you can only go fast if you go right” […]