Is the “Joel Test” still relevant?

The Joel Test

The Joel Test

I ended up having an extremely brief chat with Joel Spolsky recently in one of the Stack Exchange chat rooms. We learned, among other things that he’ll only return to Dublin when “the heroin addicts promise not to yell at him for eating fish and chips in a park near Christchurch” and that he’d like to “sing a duet of ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’ from ‘Annie get your gun’ with Jeff Atwood“. But probably of more relevance to technology & programming, I was asking him did he still consider The Joel Test an accurate barometer for grading a software development team.

The joel test is still a pretty good test; there’s not much in there I would change.

–Joel Spolsky, March 2011

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System.Threading.Tasks & Parallelism in .NET 4.0

Parallel

Parallel

Alas, all my hope & dreams & promises of a regular blog post, dashed… oh well, here’s one now.

I’ve been playing with the System.Threading.Tasks namespace over the last few hours and it’s quite neat.

We’ll be rolling out some new software in the next few months at work which Processes SMS messages from Customers. In the past we had fudged together our own Multi-Threading/Multi-Pipeline code to try and get messages through the system as quickly as possible but it was fairly bloated to say the least. Enter the new Task and Parallel classes in .NET 4.0

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Re-purposing SQL Server PARSENAME For Splitting IPv4 Addresses

Geo IP

Geo IP

I stumbled across a very nice repurposing of the PARSENAME function in SQL Server recently while playing around with some GeoIP Data. In SQL Server, the PARSENAME function is used for working with fully qualified server objects. e.g. a table on a linked server (‘LinkedServerName . Databasename . Ownername . TableName’). But PARSENAME can be used to easily split up any 4 token, dot delimited string into its constituent parts.

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Building Lambda Expressions at Runtime

Dynamic

Dynamic

Necessity is the mother of all… reasons to learn something new. So when some project requirements came down to put together a Search UI for an object graph of ~200 different properties in one wide table, we got an opportunity to play with some dynamic LINQ. We needed to come up with a quick way to allow a user to search across all the properties without making the UI unwieldy. What we provided them with was a simple UI allowing the user to apply 0:N conjunctive search filters. For each filter they choose an object property to filter by, the filtering operator (equal, less than, etc…) and the value they were searching for.

By the way, if there’s a nicer way to do this, I’d love to know about it.

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Really Microsoft… Really… (HTC HD7 Bugbears)

Really ?

Really ?

I don’t really consider myself a fan-boy for any single platform, OS or Manufacturer. I have an IPhone which I think is a great day-to-day tool and I have been toying with the idea of an IPad for a while now. On the other hand I’ve been a Microsoft .NET Developer for >8 years now, (saying that made me feel just a bit old…), I use a PC, know v. little about Mac’s and like most things MS. (.NET Dev, Xbox, Win7, etc…).

</Impartial-Fence-Sitting-Disclaimer>

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The future of UX & UI Innovations

There was fantastic stream of thought on Twitter last week about UX & UI Design; all started thanks to this tweet by @kellabyte, a Canadian developer with an uncanny knack for stirring up the masses and making them think.

Twitter Avatar

kellabyte

Kelly

@kellabyte: Desktop OS's bore me. There I said it. Get the lustre back by spending time innovating user experience. I'm looking at you OS makers.

Oct 13, 2010 @ 03:57 PM from MetroTwit

What followed was a torrent of ideas on how to improve user experience, user interfaces & user interaction in terms of both the software & the hardware we use on a daily basis. Apparently Crowdsourcing + Brainstorming = Crowdstorming and a lot of credit for this post goes to following twitter folk: @robertmclaws, @cromwellryan, @uliwitness, @Montagist, @DavidQMora, @BenPittoors, @kellabyte and Others. There was a lot covered over the course of the chat, (here as a CSV file for posterity) but a few key things rang true with me so… stream of consciousness follows.

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Silverlight 4 Clock

Silverlight

Silverlight


I was trying to get my Development Environment up & running the other day with Silverlight 4. It turns out that the Silverlight debug runtime isn’t actually part of the standard client, or the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio.

Thanks to this thread I discovered

The “Silverlight managed debugging package” is part of the developer runtime, not the SDK or Tools. Make sure you have the latest version of the developer runtime installed (available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=188039

On the plus side I did throw together this nice pretty clock just to test everything out.
There’s probably a dozen ways to break this, but it covers the basic for autosizing the grid, limiting the dimensiosn with min height & max height sections, drawing lines & drawing ellipses & a small bit of math.



XAML

<UserControl x:Class="SlvrClock.Lib.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400" MinHeight="100" MinWidth="100">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Black">
        <Line x:Name="lh" Stroke="Green" StrokeThickness="15" StrokeStartLineCap="Round" StrokeEndLineCap="Triangle" />
        <Line x:Name="lm" Stroke="Blue" StrokeThickness="10" StrokeStartLineCap="Round" StrokeEndLineCap="Triangle" />
        <Line x:Name="ls" Stroke="Red" StrokeThickness="5" StrokeStartLineCap="Round" StrokeEndLineCap="Triangle" />
        <Ellipse x:Name="el" Stroke="Yellow" StrokeThickness="5" />
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

C#

public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
    private Storyboard timer = new Storyboard(); //timer
    private const double radian = Math.PI / 180; //radian
    private bool started = false;
    private double MaxHandLength { get; set; } //shorter length of width:height
    private Point CenterPoint { get; set; }

    public MainPage()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        timer.Duration = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(50);
        timer.Completed += new EventHandler(Timer_Completed);
        timer.Begin();
    }

    protected void Timer_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        double aw2 = LayoutRoot.ActualWidth / 2, ah2 = LayoutRoot.ActualHeight / 2;
        if (!started || CenterPoint.X != aw2 || CenterPoint.Y != ah2)
        {
            //Reset the centerpoint & ratios on startup or if the window resizes.
            CenterPoint = new Point(aw2, ah2);
            MaxHandLength = Math.Min(CenterPoint.X, CenterPoint.Y);
            el.Height = el.Width = ((MaxHandLength - 10) * 2);
            lh.X1 = lm.X1 = ls.X1 = CenterPoint.X;
            lh.Y1 = lm.Y1 = ls.Y1 = CenterPoint.Y;
            started = true;
        }
        var now = System.DateTime.Now;
        //line hour - apply partial split for smoother transition and update more than onces per second.
        ChangeHand(lh, MaxHandLength - 80, 30 * (now.Hour + ((double)now.Minute) / 60));
        //line minute
        ChangeHand(lm, MaxHandLength - 60, 6 * (now.Minute + ((double)now.Second) / 60));
        //line second
        ChangeHand(ls, MaxHandLength - 40, 6 * (now.Second + ((double)now.Millisecond) / 1000));
        timer.Begin();
    }

    protected void ChangeHand(Line l, double r, double a) {
        //Calculate the point on the circumference based on Center, Radius & Angle.
        var i = a * radian;
        l.X2 = CenterPoint.X + r * Math.Sin(i);
        l.Y2 = CenterPoint.Y + r * -Math.Cos(i);
    }
}

InstallUtil, Windows Services & ProjectInstallers with App.Config Settings

Config Fun

Config Fun

We had a situation in work where we needed to make service installation a more configurable process.

So a very simple example, In order to install a .NET Windows Service we need to provide it with a username & password that the services will run as. We can either provide that information at installation time, or through the following properties in the ProjectInstaller.cs file for your service.

However in an environment where multiple developers are working on a service, particularly a service that requires elevated privileges and needs to run as a specific account, this can be a royal pain.

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta & Razor View Engine

Razor View Engine, Looking Sharp

Looking Sharp


ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta & Enhancements to the Razor View Engine was announced by Scott Gutherie last week.

The Beta release also includes, New View Helpers, Unobtrusive JavaScript, Integration with the NuPack Package Manager and some other bells and whistles. So lets take a look inside and see what we can do.

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Bad Timing & The Mysterious AWS XML Exception

Bad Luck

Bad Luck


Server Time Mis-configured, Amazon Web Services S3 .NET SDK has a bug in it, Vague XMLExceptions that don’t make sense.

Sometimes karma is just going to get you. There’s no point fighting it. A series of events & issues just come together in cosmic bliss guaranteed to completely wreck your weekend.

We rolled out some new code for a new client last week. One of the “big stories” for both us and the client was a migration away from in-house content storage to a cloud based solution. We had opted to use Amazon S3 for the file storage part and after ~6 weeks of project development, rigourous QA & Regression testing, and a bit of a stressful production release we were good to go. Our Biz/Mkt team had seen it and they were happy. Last minute checks of the production service were done, all looked good, and home we went.

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