Archives - August 2009
Conway’s Life in WPF
The “Game of Life” was invented in 1970 by John Conway , a British mathematician. The rules of the game are simple, but the resulting behavior of the system that results is often surprising and in any event difficult to predict. There’s a great deal of information available online relating...
Practice, Code Exercises, and Code Katas
One of the ways we improve as software developers is through practice. Practice isn’t just something that’s done as you go about your job – it has to be focused on improving your skills. Practice can take many forms, but two of them include practicing doing something the right way and practicing...
Iterators, Expressions, and LINQ for Euler
Recently I’ve been doing some Project Euler problems as exercises to help improve my coding skills. We do this internally at NimblePros periodically and also at last weeks Hudson Software Craftsmanship meeting, which I co-run. In doing these problems, I’ve been trying to approach them both...
Code Review – Singleton Pattern Issues
One of my applications relies on a singleton pattern to create a single instance of a server which processes requests from many different ASP.NET handlers. It is created using pretty much standard Singleton code: public static Context CreateContext() { return CreateContext( new ConfigurationFileSettings...
Caching Key Generation Considerations
Recently I was reviewing some code and ran across this – can you spot the problem? var parameters = new List<SqlParameter> { new SqlParameter( "@SomeID" , someId), new SqlParameter( "@SomeOtherID" , someOtherId), new SqlParameter( "@ServerDate" , serverTime) }; string...
MSDN Subscription Installer
As I write this, I’ve just installed Windows 7 on my development/presentation laptop, and it’s currently installing a bunch of apps using the Web Platform Installer . If you haven’t tried this tool, you should definitely check it out. It’s free and easy to use and available here . Basically...
Ad Landing Pages and Customer Conversations
One of Lake Quincy Media’s clients recently wrote to me in response to my previous post about the Principle of Least Surprise and its relationship to online advertising . Their question revolved around whether it was appropriate in their case to use their company’s home page as the landing page...
