Category: Opinion

Scott Hanselman posts a number of great tips for  improving development teams.  The technical brown bag idea is one we’ve been following at work since the spring.  We call them “learning lunches”, and they’ve proven to be an excellent vehicle for knowledge transfer, as well as connecting different offices of the company.

At my current employer and the previous one, I’ve tried to promote conferences, off-site training, and .NET user groups.  Getting the staff to attend them has been more of a challenge here than at my last job.  They’re all excellent ways of keeping technical skills sharp as well as networking opportunities.

Now that we have a new CIO at work, it will be interesting to see to what degree he’d buy in to some of these ideas.

This question comes up rather often in my job, and this post by Adam Turoff answers the question by including “when” as a variable.  In short, the sooner a project needs to succeed, the less likely it is that a rewrite will succeed.

Whenever I come across an application that isn’t designed or implemented as well as it should be, I’m biased in favor of rewriting the application.  That approach tends to meet resistance because the “when” is usually very short.  Refactoring is a good fallback option, but only if the application is relatively current.  My desire to refactor single-tier classic ASP is nil.

This error message started showing up during testing of some code changes I made to an application.  It took me awhile to figure out precisely what the problem was because the top of the stack trace referred to this:

System.Activator.CreateInstance[T]()

As looked further down the stack trace, it ultimately pointed out which class was the culprit, so I added an empty public constructor to and redeployed the result.

I found this post rather useful in diagnosing the problem.

I needed a T-SQL statement to get the created date of a couple of tables as part of a project. One of my colleagues came up with this query:

SELECT create_date FROM sys.objects WHERE type = ‘U’ AND name = ‘<tablename>’

It works in SQL Server 2005.

The SQL Server 2000 equivalent is:

SELECT crdate FROM sysobjects WHERE xtype = ‘U’ and name = ‘<tablename>’

His top three preferences in brief:

• internalized discipline over externally-enforced discipline
• coaching over enforcement
• collaboration over direction

It’s easy to agree with these preferences, but whether or not they can be put into practice depends very heavily on the members of the team. Unless you’re in a startup environment, you inherit people and culture as well as code.  While he makes a brief nod to hiring in the first section of his post, having the right people in the right places makes for much better results.

Miller does the best job of explaining his third preference.  Providing the rationale and context for a course of action gives a developer input and an opportunity to buy into an idea.  The success of this approach still depends on the having the right people.  I follow it with my own employees as much as possible.

One of the FxCop rule violations I found in one of my projects had to do with IDisposable not being implemented.  My search for examples of how to resolve this yielded a lot of helpful links, including these:

• An MSDN article on correct implementation of IDisposable
• A older CodeProject article on IDisposable that takes an odd shot at unit testing
• A newer CodeProject article on IDisposable and the dispose pattern
• A Channel9 discussion on IDisposable