December 2004 - Posts

Caching and Unit Tests

We've been playing with the Caching Application Block here at the client I'm currently working with and have found a couple of important items that will be of interest to anyone doing the same. I should say that we're using NUnit to run our unit tests, Read More...

Pure Math and Real Life II

From Raymond Chen's blog , check out this article that describes not only the concepts (in basic terms) behind the uniformly distributed points algorithm, but also some of the practical applications. First of all, the idea behind the algorithm is incredibly Read More...

Waiting for WinFS? Might want to rethink that.

For those of you who already have grand plans that require the very cool functionality that will be offered by WinFS, you might want to think about some redesign. Finding out that it wouldn't make it into Longhorn was the first blow. Now, according to Read More...

Things C# allows you to do, but shouldn't

So the offending line of code is as follows: string a = String.Empty, b; If you can explain what this is doing, you're a better person than I. Just to give you a second hint, the following is also legal syntax. string a = b, c = d, e = f; So what do these Read More...

The Memory Reclamation Phase

The project that I have been working on for the past few months has now entered it's performance tuning phase. This means that code is being gone over in great detail, looking for areas where speed gains can be realized. Because there is a high concentration Read More...

The Case for Unit Testing

A posting on Roy Osherove's blog taking issue with a post by Joel Spolsky on the failure of methodologies like MSF got me thinking. In particular, I (like Roy) took issue with the following section (which is actually written by Tamir Nitzan, but agreed Read More...

Pack Your Bags

A couple of conference announcements over the past few days help put my travel plans for next year on more solid footing. VSLive is coming back to Toronto from April 13-16. This time around, the conference will be held much closer to the heart of Toronto. Read More...

Improving the Performance of Asynchronous Web Service Calls

Notice that the name of this post doesn't say that web service performance can be improved through asynchronous calls. That is on purpose. This particular post deals with a limitation that impacts applications that utilize async web service methods. Actually, Read More...