Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series): Michael Feathers: Books I've just finished the above book, which was recommended to me by Jeffrey Palermo a few months ago.  It is one of the most useful software development books I've read since Code Complete.  I wish I'd read it years ago, and I'm finding myself ...

I interviewed a couple of college students earlier this week for internship positions with Lake Quincy Media, and one of them reminded me of my own college days when we were graded in part based on how well commented our code was.  In school, comments are typically there as a "check the block" measure to ensure that the professor ...

Office 13 is going to actually be called Office 14, since there are some people who assign some negative significance to the number 13 (see Triskaidekaphobia).  Since this is clearly a significant concern in the world of computing, it seems natural to me that other areas of Microsoft's platform should work harder to avoid this unlucky ...

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're just wrapping up a continuous integration solution for a client (and if you're not using this for your team, you should be.  If you don't have time to do it, contact us to do it for you.  You'll thank me later.) and one of the last requirements changes was an update to where on the build server's ...

An interesting pattern that I see in many of the applications I've worked with is the notion of status, and how it tends to evolve over time.  This is probably familiar to most of you, though perhaps you've never thought about it.  Consider the following scenario: Requirement - The system should have Users, to control access via ...

Rick posted earlier today about how he's having a tougher and tougher time remembering the exact syntax and details of how to do relatively simple programming tasks, and instead finds that he's going off to find past code he's written (or blogged about) all the time.  Is it the early onset of senility, or is this typical?  It's the same ...

I just ordered this book on the recommendation of a couple of MVC people: Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series) Also testing out RoyO's Amazoner tool, which appears to have worked correctly.  Nice!  What is Amazoner? Amazoner was designed to make one thing very easy if you're a blog writer who's also an ...

Tom Hollander wrote about why your customers will love agile (even if they think they hate it) last week, and made several interesting observations about how agile methodology has taken hold in many companies and teams, and why customers should really be fighting for it, rather than fearing it.  He notes that, while generally project ...

For Lake Quincy Media's AdSignia Ad Server, I wanted to be able to ensure that the database had some internal logic rules checked periodically.  What kinds of rules?  Well, probably an example would be best.  Suffice to say up front, though, that we're talking about more than NOT NULL or enforcing referential integrity.  For ...

The latest issue of CIO Magazine has a featured article on Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development.  It includes quotes from a bunch of developers, including some names you'll surely recognize if you follow Agile discussions at all, like Scott Ambler.  In addition to gurus like Scott, there's also yours truly ...