Goodbye Money
The current stock market makes the title generally appropriate, but I'm specifically talking about Microsoft Money here. I used to use Quicken pretty heavily, but I got tired of forced upgrades so I've been using Microsoft Money for a little while. Now I'm happy to be done with both of …
User Stories Are Not Narratives
The "story" in agile development's "user story" is not a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Many are short on verbs, which is a big hint that something non-narrative is going on. "User story" is shorthand for a set of concepts and principles. The danger with taking a …
UI Horror: Birthdays
Last year I wrote about my dislike for cell phones. Despite that, I actually have one now. Maybe I'll write more about that at some point, but I was just recently reminded (irony to be revealed later) of a particularly sloppy user experience associated with adding birthdays to contacts and …
.NET Cold Startup Performance: More
A few months ago I wrote about an approach to improving .NET cold startup performance. Here's a little more information that I've learned since then.
Another useful tool for optimizing cold startup is Microsoft's free CLR Profiler 2.0. While this tool has the aesthetics of a wadded-up paper sack …
Are .NET Properties a Mistake?
As I mentioned the other day, I'm reading Jeffrey Richter's book CLR via C# right now. I was kind of surprised to read this statement by the author: "If I had been involved in the design of the .NET Framework and compilers, I would not have offered properties at all …
Guidelines for Method Parameter and Return Types
I've been reading Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# lately, and just read a section titled "Declaring a Method's Parameter Types". That title doesn't exactly promise a riveting read, but it did a nice job of articulating some guidelines for method parameter and return types, independent of any particular programming language …
Corrupt docx File After Adding Custom Properties Part
I spent a few days implementing a component that adds some custom properties to Office 2007 files. Using the System.IO.Packaging namespace from .NET 3.0, and looking at some sample code in some Visual Studio snippets, things went pretty smoothly. Just when I thought I was done, though …
.NET Cold Startup Performance: An Example
When running a .NET application for the first time after rebooting or hibernating the computer, you might find that it takes a long time to start up. I've been trying to address this problem in a few situations recently. In spite of having read several articles on the subject, I …
Converting from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008
I've just finished switching over our development environment from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008 (except for a C++ solution that uses boost, which will take some further effort). These are the things that I needed to do, and the gotchas I encountered.
Automatic Test Cleanup in VS 2008
I'm working on switching from VS 2005 to VS 2008. I just tried running some unit tests and got the following dialog:
Hooray! I've been trying to figure out how to implement automatic test cleanup myself, but I (fortunately) hadn't had time to devote serious effort to it. Up to …