Previously, I posted how to support developers running Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 on the same .Net 2.0 solution on the same team, built, CI server, etc . The solution is to have 2 solution files. These files have to be kept in sync to keep a healthy build process. It is very important...

I'll be attending the AltNetConf . Convenient for me that it's in Austin, TX. It's an open space conference, and I consider it the founding conference of a conversation that is "Alt.Net". I'll be proposing the topic: What are the Alt.Net principles? . The definition of Alt.Net...

There it is. A pile of ripped up note cards denoting all the engineering tasks completed by my pair. This was an unusual day because it started at 7:30am with some white board modeling and brain-crunching a very, very tough problem. We wrote out some tasks to get us started, and we played the TDD game...

I am a big fan of shortcut keys. I find that if I can keep my hands on the keyboard and not reach for the mouse, my productivity stays high. First, I want to say thanks to Steve Donie for this change in my mindset. Steve has a key for everything, and if there is not a key for it, he has a batch script...

I find it very frustrating that there is no obvious way to have the .resx generator mark members as public instead of internal. In my team's solution, we have a need for these to be public. Here's how I solved it: Add a nant target that can do a find/replace in a file (I don't know of a shell...

There's a lot of talk about IE7 vs. FF2. It's all pretty boring for me. Browsers are boring. They are glorified terminals. Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmers fame) puts it in an interesting way: (paraphrasing) -We have the same client-server terminal we had years ago, but now the terminal...

I use GAIM for all my instant messaging. I used to use Trillian, but I switched. I use MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and GoogleTalk (Jabber). I dropped ICQ some time ago because no one I knew still used it. Recently, some MSN server changes caused GAIM to crash when logging in. The GAIM team has fixed this bug and...

Overview of Exceptions There are quite of a few things that are just laws of Object-Oriented development, and one of those is that exceptions should be avoided. If you can prevent an exception from being thrown, do it. In the world of managed runtimes, particularly Java's JRE and .Net's CLR, objects...

When .Net 2.0 first came out, I was left using the <exec /> task to call msbuild.exe to build my solution. The NAnt <solution /> task is specific to .Net 1.1 because Microsoft change the structure of project files to be MSBuild scripts. I may be a little behind on this, but NAntContrib now...