With all the fanfare around .NET Core and VS Code, you might have been lead to believe that you can’t build your boring old .NET apps inside of VS Code, but that’s not the case.
Through late 2015 and the start of 2016 I was working on a secret project that I could only allude to in conjunction with Walker Books UK and Young Rewired State to write a book to get kids coding. As a hirer, Ive seen first hand the difficulty in getting a diverse range…
Making sure that more than one set of eyes has seen all the code that we produce is an important part of software development — it makes sure that we catch bugs, keep our code readable, and share patterns and practices across the teams.
Preparing a timeline for the development of software is a difficult problem teams have proven time and time again that theyre tremendously bad at estimating how long it takes to develop software at any kind of scale.
Visual Studio 2015 dropped today, along with C# 6, and a whole host of new language features. While many new features of .NET are tied to framework and library upgrades, language features are specifically tied to compiler upgrades…
A lap around Passenger — a page object library Ive been working on for selenium.
In this video, well discuss the general concept of page objects for browser automation testing — then we’ll work into a live…
The page object model is a pattern used by UI automation testers to help keep their test code clean. The idea behind it is very simple — rather than directly using your test driver (Selenium / watin etc) you should encapsulate the calls to it’s API in…
The vast majority of software that you build and use needs to be configured feature toggles, file and directory paths, startup options. We build configurable software every single day especially if you build line of business apps.
Ive spent some time recently thinking and discussing the idea of live-streaming coding sessions. It started with conversations with my brother about how theres not really a Twitch TV for programming, but if there was Id be really into that.
At the end of last year, I asked for feedback from the community on the types of deployment tooling and environments they were building software for.
Ive collated the results, and drawn up a report with observations and recommendations.
One of the nice things around the rising tide of OWIN in the .NET ecosystem is that it literally supports hosting anywhere as long as theres a viable host!. For fans of TDD, the great thing about this is anywhere includes inside your unit tests.
There’s an interesting piece here about Nick Denton stepping down yesterday as company president of Gawker media, the first “big web media company”.
Ive been running and recording a lot of workshops over the last couple of months here is one on NuGet packaging for beginners starting out as a slide deck then moving into a practical demo.
Deploying software in the Microsoft ecosystem has long been one of the more unloved, and challenging aspects of .NET development. Over the last 3 years, there have been several improvements to deployment practices around Windows, but no single obvious way. With…
So, Im reading the largely excellent Writing High-Performance .NET Code by @benmwatson at the moment, and I wanted to share something thats expressed especially clearly, that I find ambiguous in many of the official docs.
As part of the software consultant gig, I often get involved with mentoring developers and teams. Mentoring developers one on one works pretty well, but after a point, its quite hard to scale the face time you can give to teams or departments of 50–60 people.
Last week I was helping a client with some performance problems in one of their subsystems. Performance profiling is often a tricky subject where theres no one clear preventative step, but I want to highlight a few positive qualities that it…
Yesterday I gave a talk at #DDDNorth (a free community lead conference in the “Developer! Developer! Developer!” series) about running public facing RESTful APIs. Many thanks to all the kind feedback I’ve had about the talk on social media —…
I want to talk a little about deferred execution in C#.
I use deferred execution a lot in my code frequently using it to configure libraries and build for extensibility but Ive met lots of people that understand the concept of…
The internet has been a-buzz with the recently high-profile thefts of a lot of salacious celebrity photos. As soon as it transpired that iCloud was allegedly the source of these leaks many, myself…
