Paul Hatcher

I’m trying to write some templates for MVC 2 and one of the most useful things I’ve found is being able to step into the source code and see how it is actually interpreting what you’ve written.

It’s easy enough to acquire the source, but what you might not have done before is set up a symbol server. A symbol server is a location that the Windows and Visual Studio debugging tools can use to obtain pdb files, so that you can debug almost anything, including drivers and the operating system!

Working on a project where we needed a (slight) proof of humanness, and we opted to use Recaptcha as it has a fairly simple integration with .NET.

Was fine until we wanted to use custom styling to tie in with the site which is when the fun started! A few hours later, after downloading the project’s sample app, I found some things out that I thought I’d share with you…

I’m just in the process of restructuring my source control environment, splitting the single subversion repository into multiple repositories.

Couple of reasons for this..

My repository is getting a bit big at 1.5Gb a big chunk of this are binary files produced by my continuous integration process, so I want to break this out to a dedicated repository.

I’d also like to put each client’s work into a separate repository, this makes it easier to archive off and/or remove it at the end of a project as there’s no way to delete files from a repository apart from dumping it and filtering it into a new one.

Microsoft has published the results of some empirical studies about how development practices affect quality

• Test Driven Development improves quality by 60 to 90 percent but takes 15 to 35 percent more ‘up front’ time. The time spent is compensated by savings in maintenance time later on.
• Team & organization structure has a huge impact on quality. Although this is conventional wisdom the study publishes figures to prove this. The metrics used data such as how many engineers are involved in a project, how many times individual source files were modified.
• Code coverage in tests must be used intelligently, and has less overall impact than other factors.

Another paper highlights the issues of not running the unit tests….

Decided to take the plunge on Windows 7, as a test I’ve installed in on my wife’s netbook (Samsung NC20) and if anything it’s more responsive than under Windows XP.

Next decision is whether to go the whole hog and install the 64-bit version; the machine is fairly new, a Dell Precision 690, and I like the idea of having >4Gb of RAM for some of the projects I’m working on when I might have three copies of VS 2008 open at the same time.