Developer Articles
A Developer in a Designer Hat
I want to share a client project in the form of a journal entry after you have a chance to gloss over the infographic. The focus is on how our team was formed and how we managed roles and responsibility for design in a new way. I had a hard time writing this post at […]
Study Groups – Learning Together is Better
As I’ve mentioned before, professional development is a big deal at SEP. I love learning with other people. We’ve recently kicked off a new way (for us) to learn with other people: Study Groups. What are Study Groups The idea is to go through an online course, class, book series, or other structured or self-directed […]
A quick note on EmberJs and ReactiveJS
I tweeted yesterday that I was having trouble with EmberJS and ReactiveJS integration. I’m hip-deep in an emberjs app and I can’t get my canvas to pump events through rxjs… — Brian J Ball (@Myotherpants) June 3, 2014 Well, I figured it out! With some help from the fine ReactiveX folks. The long story short […]
Why should I care what my code looks like?
Someone said to me recently “I don’t care what the code looks like, as long as it works.” This offended me because I take pride in making my code look nice and easy to read. Plus it makes me happy to develop clean code. But why should you care? I was on a project that […]
Never implement INotifyPropertyChanged again
I hate every time I am working on something and I have to implement INotifyPropertyChanged. My DRY-dey sense tingles*.* Not only am I forced to not use auto-properties (1st DRY violation), I’m forced to fire the event in each setter (2nd DRY violation), and specify the name of the property that is getting set, inside […]
Syntax Highlighting for Technical Presentations
Ever wanted a quick/easy/automated way to get syntax highlighted code from your editor of choice into PowerPoint? EVERY time I do a technical presentation I need this. Usually I resort to taking a screenshot, or finding an “export to html” type plugin for the editor I’m using at the time (Visual Studio, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, […]
Teaching StructureMap About C# 4.0 Optional Parameters and Default Values
This week I ran into wanting to use C# 4.0 optional parameters, but wanted StructureMap (my IoC tool of choice) to respect the default value specified for those optional parameters. The Problem In this example, we’ll be pulling a command out of the container. The important part is the optional constructor parameter (level), and it’s […]
Default Value
In .NET we’ve got this cool little language construct called default, that’ll give you the default value for any given type. That is, null, for any reference type, or zero/false/DateTime.Min/etc. for value types. Here it is in action (nothing amazing going on here): var x =default(DateTime); So what if you don’t know the type you […]
The file exists
Maybe I should title this post ‘How to write a better error message’ instead. I just went on a wild goose chase trying to find the solution to an error I kept seeing in SQL Server Management Studio every time I tried to run a query or open a table for editing (or anything else […]