Sometimes doing very basic things can be quite tricky in new technologies; case in point presenting a DropDownList (a ComboBox to those, including me, with a VB background) using the new EditorForModel syntax in ASP.NET MVC 2. I had a little class in my MVP framework called IdLabel which as the name implied just held an Id and a Label so that I wasn’t forced to have a separate display and edit model for every trivial case, so I wanted to do the same sort of thing when writing my shiny new MVC apps.

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 humaness, 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.