ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

Every day I work I wish for a single feature in Visual Studio: the ability to move a code file from Visual Studio to another monitor. I can't stand the fact that I can't do this! Even if I switch to MDI view Visual Studio only lets each window move around within Visual Studio and not to other monitors. I would love to have a few code files dispersed on various monitors so that I can see more of what I'm doing at any given time.

In this day and age is this too much to ask? Why the constraint?

I see a great many projects start off on the wrong foot by trying to decide all of their implementation technologies at the beginning of a project. Usually there’s a project kick-off meeting where everyone flies in from various locations to get introduced to all of the players and decide on things like what database engine are we going to use? What technology will we use to handle our data access? What user interface technologies should we use? Should we use web services?

Imagine the following interview with two interviewees, “Player A” and “Player B”:

Interviewer: “Okay, sir. Let’s say a ball is hit a little bit to your left. How do you field it?”

Player A: “Well, I’d take a few steps to the left and try to get my body in front of the ball. I’d use my left-hand to field the ball, switch the ball over to my right hand, and throw it to first.”

Player B: “I’d take a few steps to the left, keeping my body bent at the knees and the back so I could respond to any strange hops the ball might take. If I can get completely in front of the ball, comfortably, I will, but I might have to field it with one hand to the left of my body, if I can’t get my body in front of it. Depending on the direction I’m moving, the time it took me to get to the ball, and whether I got completely in front of it or not, I might have to throw it on the run.”

Based upon the two player’s answers to this question, Player B gets hired.

This might seem like the right call. The problem is that Player B is a recent college grad that majored in English and played intramural ball. Player A is Derek Jeter (Yankees shortstop) before he was really known as the Derek Jeter.

What if you were the interviewer and you had made this decision? You would’ve just altered the entire course of your team. There’s a good chance that from this decision forward you’d be losing a lot of games to the team that hired the person you let pass by.

On any given project, we typically have a ThirdParty directory where we house all our third-party assemblies that we reference. Inside of that directory we create directories representing each assembly or set of assemblies. For instance, we usually have a ThirdParty directory that contains a directory for each NUnit version we've used on the project at any given time. If we were to start a project today, we'd have a ThirdParty directory that contains an NUnit-2.4.2-net-2.0 directory (since that is the latest NUnit version).

Over the last few days I’ve been working on a high priority performance issue for a client. This issue arose not long after they started using the .NET 2.0 framework, and it was a big enough issue to delay an impending release to clients. I was told that when certain elements on the screen were refreshed by clicking a “Refresh” button, that the performance of the application paired with .NET 2.0 was not acceptable—although it was when paired with .NET 1.1. I was also told the bottleneck occurred in the DataSet.Merge method.

ThoughtShapes will present an introduction to Subversion. Topics include version control overview, Subversion installation and configuration, Subversion use-cases (for developers). Given time we will look at the new repository mirroring tool: svnsync. The overview, with references, is attached. Command-line scripts to speed adding and committing are also attached.

I'm currently working on a project that contains C# as well as VB.NET. 95% of my time is spent with C#, fortunately, since that is my strength, but since I do have to foray into VB and since I'm in love with Resharper, I downloaded the official release of Resharper 3.0 today and tried it out. Along with the VB.NET support it now has, I was interested in seeing any other cool features they've added to it.