http://www.hedgate.net Self implied Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:21:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en test http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/07/03/test/ Start a conference with a big introduction session where every speaker has to present a 45 second version of his or her session. This would make it easier for the attendees to decide which sessions to go to, and also increase the quality of the sessions. Photo from bogenfreund’s Flickr photostream I ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/07/02/the-elevator-pitch-introduction-session/ This is just a very short post linking to a couple of photos that we took to document an open space session about retrospectives and effective meetings, which we hosted at the Agila Sverige 2008 conference. Since some people asked to have them, the photos can be found at the ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/06/25/documentation-photos-from-agila-sverige-open-space-session-about-retrospectives/ As a facilitator, your role is normally a neutral one with regards to whatever is discussed. Your job is to help and encourage other people to engage and discuss in an efficient collaborative way. A common problem that occurs is when a facilitator is not seen as a neutral person ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/06/25/facilitator-tip-break-contact-when-you-are-the-centre-of-attention/ Great developers know that writing code is a much smaller and easier task than understanding and modifying code is. Therefore, they make sure that the code they write is easy to understand, and possible to extend by writing new code rather than rewriting old code. Furthermore, when a great developer encounters ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/06/17/great-developers/ A simple thing that I often do to clean up and improve code as I am trying to understand it is to extract short fragments of a method into a new, smaller method. Quite often I will move just a single line of code into a new method. The reason ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/04/24/motivation-for-one-line-methods/ Last Thursday, me and my colleague Andrés Taylor ran a session at Cornerstone’s Developer Summit 2008 in Stockholm. The title was Real Retrospectives - Not Just Talking. Our main point was that retrospectives are a great way of helping the team define (and refine) their own process, one that they ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/04/15/real-retrospectives-not-just-talking/ Late friday evening, after some wine, whisky and beer and a movie, I could not think of anything better to do than to catch up a bit on my blog reading (it’s not just my posting that is more or less dead right now, parental leave has left a lot ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/08/24/sharing/ While flipping through an old MSDN magazine* today, I was inspired to this thought: Programming is done with the nose! One way of describing programming as using your nose would be to refer to the analogy of code smells. While I have always liked that analogy, that was however not ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/07/04/programming-with-your-nose/ In More Ruby-Influenced BDD in .NET, Scott Bellware writes: I’m not sure that C# will ultimately the language that will let BDD really shine on the CLR. Without some kind of DSL ability like what can be had from Ruby and Boo, it’s kinda hard to conceive of specification syntaxes ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/06/19/will-it-be-c/ I used to subscribe to the blog Worse Than Failure (formerly The Daily WTF), but it got removed when I was trimming the number of blogs in my reader. If you have not seen it, they post examples of code that is really badly written or designed. Most often there ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/06/13/dont-blame-paula/ While Ruby does have a for-loop, it is not commonly used in idiomatic Ruby code. Instead, to loop a number of times and do something in each run you would write code like this: 5.times do |i| print i end # equivalent for loop over a range for int i in 0...5 ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/05/10/ruby-style-iterations-in-c-3-0/ Take a look at the photo to the right. Notice anything specific about it? Here is a hint: think about enforcing rules. See it now? That is right, there are no lanes, road signs, pedestrian crossings or similar. Other than the give-way markings on the ground, the intersection is completely ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/05/04/freedom-fosters-responsibility/ How to test events seem to be a question that sometimes comes up regarding unit testing. There are three different things that we want to test when using events. * Verify that an event subscriber really wires up a listener to an event * Verify that an event ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/03/13/testing-events-with-unit-tests/ From thursday evening until saturday afternoon I was at the SQL Server Open World in Denmark. SSOW turned out to be an excellent conference. There where about 140 attendees and speakers and there was a lot of interaction between people. Networking is always important and of course happens at all ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/03/11/back-from-sql-server-open-world-2007/ A month ago or so a friend of mine IM:d me and said they were having a discussion regarding properties, if they should always be used to access fields or if you could sometimes just make the fields public. My response was instant (it was IM after all): Always use ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/02/24/public-fields-vs-properties-and-a-bit-of-yagni/ A couple of days ago I was trying to solve a problem with databinding in WPF. What I was trying to do was to create columns for a ListView (with a GridView set for it’s view). Creating columns was no problem, neither was binding the columns to some property of ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/02/21/dynamically-databinding-a-wpf-control-to-items-in-a-list/ One of the most demoralizing and improductive things that can happen to a project and team are endless discussions about methodology. Do not get me wrong here, how we work should definitely not be a once-and-for-all decision that we can never change. Quite the contrary, we must reflect regularly on the ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/02/09/strange-card-games-and-methodology-discussions/ About a year ago I wrote an article for the SQL Server Standard magazine called Understanding CLR integration in SQL Server 2005. This article is now also available here at my site, in the Articles section. It is an overview of how the CLR and SQL Server work together and ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/02/02/article-about-clr-integration-posted/ If you try to run a test like the following from NUnit, you will find that it does not work. You get an InvalidOperationException telling you that “The calling thread must be STA, because many UI components require this”. [Test] public void CanCreateAndShowWpfWindow() { Console.WriteLine(Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState()); System.Windows.Window window = new System.Windows.Window(); ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/01/08/instantiating-a-wpf-control-from-an-nunit-test/ On the XP mailing list, Adam Sroka posted this great reply to a question regarding how to write a story when there is no user involved. The entire thread is very interesting, but this message contains probably the most well written description that I have seen of the customer in ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2007/01/04/user-stories-and-customer/ Ayende Rahien recently wrote a very well thought through post discussing The Problem of Open Source in the Microsoft World. This is a must-read for any .NET developer who has reached the stage of looking for tools outside of Microsoft. As Ayende describes, a big part of the problem is ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/12/11/plus-one-on-ayendes-oss-post/ I did a presentation two days ago at SNUG. The topic was Testable UI Code. The title of my presentation was actually “Cleaning up the mess” with the subtitle “How to take control over monstrous UI classes“. You can download the presentation and code (it was mostly code) in a ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/12/08/testable-ui-code-presentation-at-snug/ My friend and former colleague Magnus MÃ¥rtensson recently wrote about his feelings about YAGNI and how he instead would like us to follow what he calls “GYCFKSTF” (Give Yourself Credit For Knowing Some Things First). I do not quite agree with what he says (but I guess you knew that ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/12/06/quick-should-never-imply-dirty/ In an earlier post I mentioned very briefly the one-assert-per-test-method rule. This is something I think originally came from Dave Astels and definitely a guideline that I try to follow. The reason is of course that it helps make tests simpler and more expressive and therefore make them more helpful ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/11/17/one-assertion-per-test-should-come-natural/ Recently I have been trying the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) approach to developing software. Normally, when I am doing TDD there are a couple of “house-rules” that I like to follow. These have developed over time, often following advice from either a colleague or other resource. One such “rule” that has developed ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/20/to-setup-or-not-to-setup/ A couple of weeks ago I was engaged as trainer for the course 2779: Implementing a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database. The module that was by far the most difficult according to the attendees was the one on xml, with none of them having any practical experience with xml. One ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/09/for-xml-explicit/ One of the cool things about Dotway is that we have these “competence weekends” three or four times a year, where we go away to some hotel and geek out about something more or less of technical nature. As Andrés mentions recently we spent a weekend learning about TDD. One ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/unit-testing-internals/ This Thursday I will be in Stockholm for the Swedish SQL Server User Group’s final meeting of 2005. The two presentations will be given by none other than Dr. Michael Rys of Microsoft (and member of the ISO standard SQL committee as well as the XQuery committee on W3c)! I ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/coming-user-group-meetings/ I do not think I have yet posted a message that is only meant for Swedish (speaking) readers. Anyway, this post is probably mostly interesting to Swedish-speaking people, but I will keep it in English anyway (except where not possible, as is natural from the following discussion). A couple of months ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/to-aggregate-or-not-to-aggregera/ So I was at the Swedish SQL Server User Group meeting in Stockholm yesterday. It’s sad that there is never anyone but me from SkÃ¥ne (the part of Sweden where I live) that come there, but of course it is an hour’s flight and the meeting ends at like 21.30 ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/sqlug-michael-rys/ Here is an interesting question. You are at point A and want to get to point B. The problem is that you do not know exactly where point B is. So to help you find it you have a device that always shows you the current direction to point B. ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/driving-a-car-or-riding-the-bus/ Performance tuning and troubleshooting in SQL Server has always been something of a black art. To be effective at it you need to know how to use a large set of tools, including Profiler, Perfmon, DBCC commands and stored procedures. Sometimes it can seem almost random which tool you should ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/dynamic-management-objects-in-sql-server-2005/ I have been listening to an excellent webcast called Lessons Learned from the Warroom. It features Peter Provost, Brian Button, Brad Wilson and Darrell Snow (all working in the Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft) discussing what they have learned from working by agile methodologies. Among the projects they have ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/agile-advice-from-p-p/ The agile community is full of words of wisdom. These often describe a lot more about the process than an article (or even books), at least if you understand the meaning behind them. The funny thing is that many of these are often kind of inverted wisdoms, negations if you ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/inverted-wisdom/ I spent a couple of minutes with a confused look on my face today. I was writing a CLR function and wanted to output some information about the progress. SqlContext.Pipe.Send("some message"); should work, right? Nope, a NullReferenceException was all I got for my troubles. I figured out that it was ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/no-pipe-in-functions/ While experimenting a bit with impersonation in SQLCLR I noted two things I thought would be good to mention here. Firstly, if you are creating a function you need to set the named parameter DataAccess or SystemDataAccess (I assume it works with both set as well) of the SqlFunction attribute ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/two-notes-about-impersonation-in-sqlclr/ Eric Gunnerson recently posted an interesting piece of C# code and asked what it does. As he explains in the follow-up discussion post, the reason why it does what it does is that we would not want the behaviour of our program to change due to a new method being ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/extension-methods-and-method-overload-resolution/ Earlier today I set out to create a SQLCLR function for splitting a comma-separated string including ranges (such as â��2,5,7-9,13â��) into a set of values. I encountered some problems that I think is valuable to document here. The code below shows what I initially wrote: SqlFunction( DataAccess = DataAccessKind.None, ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/troubles-with-shared-state-and-anonymous-delegates-in-sqlclr/ While browsing the SqlServerCentral.com forums earlier today I saw a question that interested me. The person asking it wanted to split a string containing a repeating group of values into a set of values. I remembered that Eric Gunnerson is running a series of regular expression puzzle questions and that ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/splitting-a-comma-separated-string-with-ranges-included/ In my latest article entitled Dynamic Management Objects I describe a great new feature in SQL Server 2005. With Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) and Dynamic Management Functions (DMFs) we can get a lot of real-time information regarding what have been going on in the server since the latest restart. I ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/index-lookups-seeks-and-scans/ I recently posted a recommendation about avoiding magic numbers in stored procedures (and other t-sql routines of course). Yesterday I updated that post with some important info that invalidates the recommendation from a performance view. Please read the updated post if you have not seen this. However, I still think ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/more-on-magic-numbers/ UPDATE: I have just read a post by Ian Jose from the Query Optimizer team that sort of invalidates this recommendation. He writes that you should use literals, or at least unchanged parameters, for query inputs. As his post shows, using variables as I write below can often have a ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/stored-procedure-guidelines-avoid-magic-numbers/ I read Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit this morning. I love the fast-paced to-the-point writing style of Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (and the other authors in their publishing house), and this book was no different than other books in the Pragmatic-series. Most of the contents was stuff ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/04/review-pragmatic-unit-testing-in-c-with-nunit/ Chain of Responsibility: Avoid coupling the sender of a request to its receiver by giving more than one object a chance to handle the request. Chain the receiving objects and pass the request along the chain until an object handles it. GOF p.223 In the book, the GoF mention how in Smalltalk it ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/design-patterns-in-ruby-chain-of-command/ One of the cool things about working at Dotway is the Design Patterns study group that we have. We have been meeting weekly/biweekly/sometimes for a while now and each time we discuss one of the GoF patterns in detail. We like to find out how they are used, what variations ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/design-patterns-in-ruby/ In the project I am currently working on we are using Windows Presentation Foundation for building the GUI. This means there are a lot of new things to learn. Even the small things take some time when you do not know which of the new controls to use are what ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/setting-the-contents-of-a-wpf-richtextbox/ Wednesday evening we had the last SNUG meeting before summer. The meeting was hosted Dotway. We had a great turnout with around 30 people apart from us that arranged it, even though we informed about the meeting as late as two weeks earlier. First we had Jim Christensen from Commentor ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/active-record-presentation-at-snug/ I just noted in my MCP transcript that I passed the Beta Exam for 70-431 TS: Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 â�� Implementation and Maintenance. This means that I am now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) for SQL Server 2005. Curiuosly though, I do not feel any different. :) It is ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/microsoft-certified-technology-specialist/ I am back home after attending PASS Europe 2006 in Barcelona, where I also presented a session myself. I have uploaded a zip file with the presentation that I did (Understanding CLR Integration in SQL Server 2005). I will be posting a followup post about some of the things that ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/pass-europe-2006-over/ Last week me and Andres where in Barcelona for three days. The main reason we where there was that I was presenting a session at the PASS Europe 2006 conference, and we of course wanted to see as much as possible of the other sessions at the conference as well. ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/getting-things-done-with-tdd-and-pair-programming/ I have been trying for a few days (hey, I’m on vacation and have been spending time with my girlfriend, son and dog so I have not spent a lot of time with this) to get FeedTools to work with a Rails application I am working on. I had a ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/10/03/getting-feedtools-to-work-with-sql-server/ A while ago my host had a major mishap with a server, resulting in my blog getting “lost” and moving to a new server (at the same host though). Unfortunately it also meant my content was lost, and as far as I understand there are no backups (my bad). I ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/09/08/assert-isempty-blog/ Interaction based testing is a technique that is often made much more difficult and/or magical than it needs to be. Any experienced TDDer will have lots of arguments for and against using a mock framework for doing interaction based testing. Personally I have been very much for and very much ... http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2006/09/04/really-simple-faking/