Gregory Beamer is writing an interesting series on Linear thinking.  I think the PoEAA name for what he’s talking about is Transaction Script and boy have I seen a lot of it.  One of the problems that Gregory brings up is large classes.  Now I haven’t seen the classes in question but to me it seems smelly that the class is complex enough that Gregory would need to use screen splitting to see the variables that exist for the class and the rest of the code. In following with some fairly common advice I’ve switched to...

As I look at my list of projects I consider as being active in my life ala Getting Things Done I realize now that I am… Trying to do way too much at once. Focusing way too much in one area. These are really important things to realize.  So even if you don’t go full blown GTD I suggest taking 10 minutes and writing down every ‘project’ you are thinking of right now.  Once you’ve got that list, evaluate it and make sure that you’re being realistic with yourself about how...

Or as I like to call it… “The day of the Coder is over..”. While the title of this book implies that the target audience is people who feel their job is in danger from outsourcing I think it has a much wider audience.  In fact I would suggest that almost everyone who writes software for a living can find value in this book.  I am a strong believer that the day of the Coder who sits in the corner writing code without ever interacting with others is quickly fading away.  In today’s market it’s important that we all understand...

I once had the fortune of working for a company that went out of its way to make sure the customer was always happy.  The benefit of this simple behaviour was huge for this company.  Word of mouth on our product was huge and more importantly when customers did have problems they were happy to give us the time and assistance we needed to resolve the issue.  Customer support is what made that company as successful as it was.   For this reason customer support continues to be an area of interest for me.  I always find it funny...

Or as I like to call it.. “The reason I got organized enough to actually do this series”. I’m going to do something a little odd here.  I am going to discuss a book I haven’t finished yet.  But the reason I’m going to do so is that even though I am only half way through this book with a bit of help from Patrick Rhone I was able to take the basic ideas and do an initial implementation of them using Backpack.  As I continue to read I find ways to improve that implementation but for the most part...

As a believer in the principles of the ALT.NET movement I believe in continuous analysis of myself and how I am doing my job.  Over time this and discussions with other have lead me to believe that as time progresses one of the most fundamental abilities a Software Developer needs to have is the ability to deal with people.  This concept called “Soft Skills” has become critical to us in our daily work.  Now the problem for me is that like a lot of developers out there I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fountain of soft skill information.  With that...

I’m a big time fan of the Passive View pattern.  I find that in terms of allowing for testing of the UI, Passive View allows me to get as close to the user as possible.  While there are a few ways to handle communication in Passive View my preference is on direct references.  By this I mean the Presenter has a reference to an interface that the View implements and the View has a reference to the Presenter.  I don’t use an interface for the Presenter because honestly in all my time I’ve never actually seen the Presenter...