Archives - September 2008
Monty Hall Envelope Puzzle
So, recently I wrote about my introduction to the Monty Hall problem and its solution . However, in the course of thinking about this problem, I came up with a related one that is pretty tricky as well, and builds on the insight gained from the Monty Hall problem. That is, given three random chances...
Favorite Developer Books
Updated 29 Dec 2009 I've written a few posts recently about various books, and recently while interviewing a candidate for Nimble Software Professionals it occurred to me that for an experienced developer (e.g. not a new grad out of college), asking what their favorite (or most recently read) programming...
Probability Puzzle Answered
In a recent post, I described a Probability Puzzle that is actually known as the Monty Hall Problem . This is a fairly famous problem and has a long write-up on Wikipedia that is definitely worth reading to get a good understanding of the problem. Almost everyone fails to answer this problem correctly...
Strategy Pattern With Ninject
This is a follow-up to my post about avoiding dependencies with design patterns . It left off with something like this as a Cart object that uses the Strategy pattern to avoid a direct dependency on SMTP emails. 1: public class Cart 2: { 3: private ISendEmail emailProvider; 4: //public Cart() 5: //{...
Probability Puzzle
I was recently introduced to the following puzzle by another developer (from Vertigo , in fact). This is actually a fairly well-known problem and you'll find write-ups about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere, but I'll omit links to those sources from this post to prevent some temptation to just click and...
Review - Murach ASP.NET 3.5 Programming with VB
I have a copy of Murach's ASP.NET 3.5 Web Programming with VB 2008 ( book web site ) that I received over the summer and have been meaning to write a short review. So here goes. First of all, I love the "Murach format" for books, especially for "how-to" books which as it happens tend to be what they...
Slack and Constraints and Optimizing Throughput
This is my second post that's related to my recent reading of Poppendiecks' Lean Software Development - read the first one here on Delaying Decisions . A related book (and one thing I loved about Lean Software Development were the many references to other great books, some I'd read, some not) that I...
Recursive FindControl
I've been asking for a recursive FindControl() method as a method off of System.Web.UI.Control for years but so far no luck. You find yourself needing these frequently when you work with composite controls, like most of the Login family of controls introduced with ASP.NET 2.0. In particular, LoginView...
Graffiti CMS Extension for DotNetKicks
I've been manually adding DotNetKicks icons to my posts recently to try and generate more buzz for them, but that gets old quickly, so about an hour ago I decided to figure out how to make this automatic. My current blog engine is Graffiti , which I really like, and after doing some searching for a pre...
Avoiding Dependencies
I gave a one day class to about 20 developers today introducing Microsoft .NET, C#, and ASP.NET. As it was only one day and there were no hands-on labs, coverage was necessarily cursory, but overall things went very well. In the course of discussing the Base Class Library and specifically the areas of...
Codebehind Files in ASP.NET MVC are Evil
With the current versions of ASP.NET MVC ( Preview 5 ) that have shipped, the default MVC template sites all include codebehind files for the ASP.NET views. For example, here's a screenshot of what a new project looks like the one at right. Further, adding a new ASP.NET MVC View Page will also include...
CodePlex Support For TortoiseSVN
CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project repository. It is built using Microsoft Team Foundation System and as such has until recently required the use of Team Explorer to access. However, due to the extreme popularity of Subversion (SVN), an open source tool for source control configuration, CodePlex...
Interesting Slide Deck on Software Design
Just found Allen Holub's Everything You Know Is Wrong presentation , via the Yahoo DDD group . It makes a great case for favoring interfaces over inheritance and avoiding property getter/setters in favor of delegating work to the object being referenced (such that you don't need to know its properties...
Delaying Decisions
I've recently finished reading Mary and Tom Poppendieck's Lean Software Development title, which I'll write a review of in a later post. One of the points they make, devoting a all of the book's third chapter to it in fact, is that there is tremendous business value in delaying decisions. Lean software...
Interfaces and Testing
Chris Brandsma posted his thoughts on a discussion he had about interfaces as a requirement for TDD (or unit testing in general, I would say). I added a brief comment there but wanted to expand on my thoughts here, as I only fairly recently came to believe my current stance. See, I've heard that interfaces...
P3P Trouble with Internet Explorer
Recently I've had some customers request that some third party scripts Lake Quincy Media provides avoid the evil eye of death that IE6+ likes to show if such scripts even think about using cookies. In our case, we are testing to see if the browser has Flash installed, and save the result in a cookie...
Find Duplicate Files and Clean Up Disk Space
I'm in file cleanup mode tonight as my laptop hard drive is consistently nearly full lately. On a side note I'm really looking at getting an HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server like the one ScottHa got a while back , but they're a bit old at this point so I figure newer models with more RAM and larger...
Client Side Client Detection
I just heard about a new flavor of the top of the line client detection component, BrowserHawk , that is being branded as "BrowserHawk To-Go (BHTG)." What's interesting about this (to me) is that it's following a SaaS model and a pay-as-you-go scheme for pricing. This makes the software very affordable...
Keep Vista from Changing Folder View
I've been running Windows Vista since it came out in November 2006. By and large I'm happy with it and wouldn't go back to XP, which I'm still running on some other PCs. However, once annoyance that I've finally gotten fed up enough with to track down the fix is the constantly changing folder view issue...
