December 2008 Entries
I’ve bought 3 Vantec external hard disk cases. And I have to say I have been very disappointed and I just had to post about this even though it’s unrelated to code. I have taken very good care of these cases. I have not mishandled either the cases nor the cords but from my experience each one has failed fast. Specifically I have had the following problems: 1) Power. Either the power cord fails, or the actual inlet to the box fails. 2) USB Inlet fails. It becomes very loose over a short period of time resulting in failure with...
Technorati Tags: Rants I was reading my incoming mail today. Got another .NET Insight email. Decided this time to read it and not push it off to my article folder in Gmail. One of the first lamest articles I’ve ever seen from Visual Studio Magazine which definitely can have good articles, was “hotka’s Labyrinth: The End of the Language Wars”. What’s the point of this post? How does this benefit anyone? It’s a null point. He claims that this will end the wars against which language is better because .NET is language independent. As far as I am concerned...
Technorati Tags: FireFox,Tools Speed Dial has been around for quite a while. But have you really tried it out and seen how useful this is? While it may slow down FireFox a little bit (small inconvenience if you manage it right), I love it. Rather than hunt through a ton of favorites or even use Google’s tabs on my Google homepage, I like this even better because I don’t have to do anything to find my most used sites. It’s right in my browser after I launch Mozilla. Speed Dial saves me a lot of time because I...
I would like to expand this post with your themes. I will start with mine and if you send me yours I will edit this post & put it up for you and I will include your name (if you do not want your name given just tell me), settings file for download, and a screen shot. Please make sure they are original (your own work) and you did not get them from Scott Gu, Scott Henselman or any other site for that matter. I think it would be cool to get some more original what I call artistic...
Technorati Tags: Tools,Books For a long time, I used my mouse rather than my keyboard as a primary means (with exception to the basic keyboard shortcuts) to move around in Visual Studio. Obviously I knew that this was not efficient even though I’d lie to myself and say to colleagues I was just as fast with my mouse and my few pile of shortcuts as with anyone who used keyboard shortcuts as a primary means to navigate around windows or code. Since then I’ve picked up a ton of shortcuts and realize just how fast it really is. The...
Technorati Tags: Standards I think one of the best standards any team could have in their pocket is the Cyclomatic Complexity metric by Thomas McCabe. It sounds fancy but really it’s just a very good guideline that every developer on your team should use and think about when creating a method every time in code. It’s simple, your methods get a risk rating based on the following forumual:number of decision points +1 a decision point is just a line in the method where you had to make a decision with code (see the example in Wikipedia). And part...
Technorati Tags: C#,Standards,Rants There are two major annoyances when it comes to good code and readable code. Here are 2 things that really every team should ensure happens (at least in my opinion ). 1) Any method should not be more than 50 lines but preferably < 25 if possible. I cannot stand huge methods. The point of OOP is to abstract logic out into manageable pieces. Methods are meant to mainly do one unit of work. Not 5 units to make up 1 unit. Put your logic in reusable methods so that they are not only reusable, but...
Technorati Tags: Marketing & SEO As a developer, one of the things that bugs me most is the rigidness of the corporate culture today in general. Companies such as manufacturing, transportation, and government just to name a few and I have worked at a few companies like this before. What bugs me about many of these old-school type organizations is that they do not embrace change when it comes to the web. They do not care about the website enough to make sure it’s inviting, has useful tools, etc in many cases. Some say and give the excuse that...
Technorati Tags: C#,ASP.NET,Web Controls If you have worked with any type of container in ASP.NET (Grids, Repeaters, etc.) you know that you cannot simply access any of its underlying collection of controls (for example if you have a div or some other control located inside the repeater) unless you gain a reference to that repeater object first, and then perform a FindControl to search within that repeater container to gain reference to whatever nested control (in my case I wanted to reference a div) you want to work with. Nothing new here. But when you start playing with custom controls...
Technorati Tags: Management,Workplace,Opinion I’ll be frank. I’ve worked for some real dumb assholes (in the past) as have many I’m sure. And several of these managers or leads fallen into one of these categories: a) Dumb but very nice (should never be in a management or lead position). Got there from kissing ass or got lucky b) Dumb, overly nice 99% of the time, but blows up suddenly when things do not go well turning into dumb assholes c) Dumb & Complete Assholes all the time d) Smart and Complete Assholes all the time...
