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The big new feature in C# 5 is asynchronous programming support, which I wrote about last week. However, the C# folks have also slipped in a couple of smaller features and I thought I’d round things out by mentioning those. New and exciting tools for "Writing Enterprisey Code".
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Async is the big one, but I really like that will be able to get the name of the method calling a method. The other stuff you can get is nice, but the method name is the best part.
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Markdown is getting a lot of traction in the development community. I thought it would be cool to have something like Google Docs for Markdown-based documents. We would use this as a learning experience for doing a real world project in Node.js on Windows Azure. And by the way: you're reading this article in it. A Google Docs-like app for Markdown.
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Despite occasionally feeling slower in .NET or Java than in, say, Ruby or CoffeeScript, one way to keep up the pace is with a technique we call Hate-Driven Development. I’m not talking about this kind of HDD, where you hate the code. At Atomic, HDD refers to the editor hating you. Our sense of the word refers to the horror-inducing full-saturation red highlights that appear all over the code when you use instances of unknown classes or call methods that don’t yet exist. Try HDD. You might learn to love the editor telling you what to do next.
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The internet contributes to 8.3% of the UK economy, a bigger share than for any of the other G20 major countries, a new study suggests. That made it bigger than the healthcare, construction or education sectors. The UK also carries out far more retail online than any other major economy. Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the WiFi!
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There have been 3 myths floating around the web regarding Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 Tablets and the demand for them in the Enterprise. There's a simple reason why these erroneous assumptions are getting so much airtime. It has a lot to do with the fact that the tech writers and bloggers who write this very rarely have worked in IT in the enterprises they write about. Apple is clearly ahead, Google are kind of stalled and Microsoft is about to enter the battle.
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Many, many months ago, Declan Eardly asked why the \ character was chosen as the path separator. The answer's from before my time, but I do remember the original reasons. It all stems from Microsoft's relationship with IBM... An oldie-but-goodie about some oldies-but-goodies in MS-DOS.
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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, solid state, and ludicrously cheap hobby ARM based computer designed in the UK. It has a USB port, video, sound, an Ethernet port, 256MB RAM, and can run 3 distinct flavours of Linux. Ostensibly the device was developed with the aim of getting kids to code, and as someone who grew up with the UK hobby computing scene of the 1980s and cut their programming teeth hacking games together on the ZX Spectrum, this is something I can thoroughly get behind. Small. Capable. CHEAP!
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Sorry, I cannot get too excited.
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Well I am sorry that somebody thinks that my response is worth a 1 vote. Sour grapes.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Small. Capable. CHEAP! Unavailable in the UK[^]
FTFY, Not that I'm bitter or anything :mutters:
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You've got a new (or old) computer and you want to hook up a peripheral, upgrade the RAM, or maybe just figure out what all those sockets are for. Here's your ultimate resource: A "spotter's guide" for all the RAM, all the sockets, all the connectors you're likely to find on most machines from today or yesteryear. "Horizontal boosters. Alluvial dampers? ...bring me the Hydrospanner."
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With CSS3 gradients, transitions, and all the effects, it has really seemed to have taken a lot of the weight off the shoulders of our websites, because let’s be honest—images were surely weighing them down. CSS3 and CSS can’t do everything but, ironically enough, I doubt most of us are aware of its limitations or what pushes the very edges of its possibilities. Well, today we are here to find that out. With these fancy effects, we simply do not need images to do all the things we used to need them for.
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and 9 / 10 wont work in IE
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With more frameworks being bundled with an ORM, SQL is quickly becoming a lost art and is mostly relegated to the nerdiest of our clan — those pesky database people. Why not take today’s quiz and see whether you DB-chops have really gone the way of the dodo? INSERT the right answers and JOIN a SELECT GROUP.
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Actually I do not beleive that is not quite right since many frameworks have something similar to LINQ, which is basically SQL. I do not beleive that there are tools yet that make this really easy, and in someways it is harder because not as easy sometimes to test. SQL tends to be very easy to test against the database.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: right
Terrence Dorsey wrote: and
You missed a few.
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Why can’t we just use vector-based icons in our application? At first glance, both designers and developers only stand to gain from switching to creating their icons in vector format. On the other hand, there’s a lot of art and a lot of craft involved in creating and maintaining a consistent visual iconography language within the specific application, and across the entire platform. Here are the issues, and some possible solutions. Pixel-perfect pictures and the great Raster Tragedy.
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You’re in a car driving 100 miles per hour on a dirt road. The turns are 100-degree hairpins and there are inclines and dips that would make a normal car’s shocks fall right off their axles. Lucky for you, you’re not alone. You have a partner. Because there are two of you, you can split the responsibilities of getting to the finish line first – in one piece. This is the basis of pair programming. The deliberate practice of staffing every workstation with two software engineers focused on writing software together. There’s also pair programming’s little-talked-about stepbrother: Blame the guy in the next cubicle.
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Tried this once many years ago. Never again. We ended up nearly killing each other: both had very different ideas and ways of working - just didn't work. The only way I can ever see this working is if one is submissive, one dominant in which case you might as well not bother. One of the worst ideas ever.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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I think the real little brother to pair programming is called peer reviews. While in car racing it is important to get the job done in record time, in programming we have a more relaxed schedule. So why not let one person start the job and bring the other in when the first one thinks he/she has everything in place.
For some really critical parts of code that are extremely hard to test, we have experimented with pair programming -- without even having a name for it. And the results were not bad at all. It's just a little expensive for every-day code.
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Peer reviews?
In the 1970s, it was called Egoless Programming.
We invent new terms but not new technology that would really increase programmer productivity.
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Two programmers. One workstation. One cubicle.
You would be lucky to get 50% out of each programmer; that is, assuming they were putting out 100% in the first place.
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When Tim Berners Lee invented web he was looking for a system to publish scientific documents remotely accessible, visually attractive, easy to code and easy to use for a non-technical person. For these reasons the World Wide Web was conceived as a page (document) based system with hyperlinks. Page based development forces a style of coding weird, repetitive (plenty of includes) and inefficient (both bandwidth and computing power) not found in desktop development. Single-Page Interface programming fixes this. AJAX points the way to a better web.
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Genuine scientific progress is usually collaborative even if the nature of fame, and fiction, is to single out individuals. When listing the world changers of the last 60 years, you might start with Watson or Crick for the structure of DNA – but while both did key work they also needed Rosalind Franklin and a host of other supporting characters. There is also far more to DNA than its structure. ‘Nutty professor’ is more like it.
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