Deadlines!!  Panic mode!!  You’ve been there. Go on. Admit it! Some of you are probably there right now, though how you have time to read a blog post I’m not sure :-) We know how it happens.  You started a project and provided some initial estimate which, like all estimates, was wrong.  Even so, someone in... Read more

  It’s nice to know that you’re sanitising your user input but I’m pretty sure that my bog standard email address isn’t a SQL Injection attack. Read more

So I recently reached the tipping point of frustration and I got so sick of Adobe Flash causing problems on my system that I decided I’m over it, and over Adobe products in general.  The software they release is just so poor I don’t want it any more and I’d rather live without it even if... Read more

This should be a fun week.  Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be attending the Visual Studio 2010 launch and speaking at the Australian ALM conference (http://www.australianalm.com.au) with sessions on unit testing with VS2010 and lessons from agile implementations. I’m also aiming to record a number of episodes for the Talking Shop Down Under podcast whilst I have... Read more

One of the frustrations with MSTest is that it is falling behind the times for unit testing when compared to other testing frameworks. I find it a real shame this this is happening and that MSTest didn’t gain an Assert.Throws method at any point along the way and that we still have to stick the ExpectedException... Read more

UPDATE: Recent changes mean that the shelveset approach to checking in changes is no longer required. See Git-TFS Recent Improvements for more informationI posted a while ago on how to get Git and TFS version control working together, however there are some limitations with that approach that reduces it’s usefulness for some people, specifically that checking... Read more

Last night at the Sydney Alt.Net user group I facilitated a Coding Dojo.  There’s a short summary of how it went on the site. I won’t repeat what I’ve said about it there since you can read it for yourself. Instead I will say that I felt very privileged to be able to watch a great... Read more

Agile frameworks and approaches put a high degree of attention on getting things done quickly and efficiently.  The end goal being to get software into production as efficiently as possible with a level of quality that makes the customer happy and provides a good return on investment.  You will often hear people talking about agile (and... Read more

As part of my desire to improve my podcasting techniques (for the Talking Shop Down Under podcast) I’ve just gone and purchased a Blue Snowball microphone.  Here’s a few pictures of what it looks like:   What surprised me was the size of it.  From promo photos on the web you can’t really get a feel... Read more

Aymeric posted a link on the Readify internal tech list today showing a fresh approach to navigating code in an IDE. Here’s the link: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm And here’s the YouTube vid to save you clicking through. It’s a really novel and interesting idea and one I would absolutely love to see working in Visual Studio 2010.  Given... Read more

Inflammatory title?  Maybe. But I'm not the only person to complain that MSTest is bad and should only be used when no other alternative is available.  But those who don’t know better will say that when you look at all the unit test frameworks they all do much the same right? So how can MSTest be... Read more

On Episode 2 of the Talking Shop Down Under podcast (go subscribe!) I was talking with Matt Hamilton and saying how it would be nice to have a Twitter client inside Visual Studio, given that’s where we spend a large amount of our time. Well, I decided to not just talk about it, and actually do... Read more

Following on from my previous blog post where I wondered publicly wether I should create yet another podcast there was enough feedback and interest in it to convince me to have a crack at it.  So that’s exactly what I’ve done. So I’d like to announce that the Talking Shop Down Under Podcast (the name of... Read more

Or do you for that matter? For those who don’t follow me on twitter (and why not!?) I’ve been doing an internal podcast in Readify where I interview some of our new staff.  Anyway Dave (who is not Readify) suggested that I create a public podcast as well, which I have thought about before. Before I... Read more

Ken Schwaber (co-creator of Scrum) moved on from the Scrum Alliance last year to found the Scrum.org organisation specifically to meet some goals that differ in purpose to those of the Scrum Alliance.  To quote from the Scrum.org front page Scrum.org is staffed by the developers of Scrum and the best Scrum practitioners in the industry,... Read more

I guess the picture on the left says it all, but just in case you have images turned off I’m speaking at the Australian ALM Conference coming up this April. I’ll have two sessions that I’ll be foisting on an unsuspecting public, the first of which will be on Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2010 and... Read more

Update: There's now a second approach for doing this that you may want to look atTFS has a lot going for it and from a team perspective it’s a fantastic tool and something I wouldn’t pass up willingly.  That said it is a little lacking in some areas and one of those is the source control... Read more

We’re doing a bit of work testing web sites with IE6 (still! I know!!) since it’s in our browser compatibility list, yet we do all our development using Windows 7. One little trick we’ve done to make this somewhat easier is to install Windows XP Mode on our machines.  So we can launch the Windows XP... Read more

For a bit of fun I decided to try and record a podcast just to see how it’s done.  As it turns out, it’s not too hard at all. For my little experiment I wanted to try and do one of those interview style podcasts, not just one where it’s me talking by myself but one... Read more

Code contracts are great and I really recommend you use them, but how do they fit into a TDD/BDD flow of development? When you do test first development you really want to write your unit test and then use the code contracts to satisfy those tests and hit some of those boundary conditions.  You could also... Read more