bling on software

I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts lately and I came across a gem that was pretty darn useful.  It’s pretty old I suppose in technology standards, since it was recorded January 12, 2009, but it’s still worth a listen.  Scott Hanselman talks with Scott Bellware about TDD and design.  Find it here. I’m merely reiterating what Scott has already said in the podcast, but it’s different when I can personally say that I’m joining the ranks of countless others who have seen the benefits of TDD. Read on...

There you have it!  I started with Visual Studio’s default settings and configured each and every color one by one.  3 hours later I was finished and satisfied with what I have…but I think it was time well spent considering this is what I’m looking at for >= 8 hours a day. This was a complete re-do of my previous dark theme.  This one is even more colorful than the previous, mainly because Resharper does an amazing job of detecting additional code elements like mutable vs unmutable, or unused code, in additional to many other things. Read on...

I need to show some love and support for my favorite IoC tool because it’s most powerful feature needs more explaining.  It’s not that the main site doesn’t provide a good explanation, because it does, but because most people don’t really understand what the solution is solving. The following is on Autofac’s front page: var container = // ... using (var inner = container.CreateInnerContainer()) { var controller = inner.Resolve<IController>(); controller.Execute(); // use controller.. Read on...

I’ve been experimenting lately with TeamCity 5 EAP and so far it’s been a pretty awesome experience. I was up and running within minutes and I was swarmed with beautiful graphs and statistics with specifics even per-test. Getting something like that up with CC.NET is not a trivial task. Anywho, with TC5 code coverage is one of the cool new features added for .NET, but unfortunately only NUnit is supported. Not that that’s a bad thing, but some people prefer to use other testing tools. Read on...

Inevitably as a project gets more complicated, you will need to start using more features of your IoC container. Autofac has built-in support for property injection by hooking into the OnActivating or OnActivated events, which basically set all public properties (or only those which are unset). However, I didn't really like this because once you start using properties, it's not as clear cut as constructors that you are using injection. It becomes hard to manage later on when you have many properties which some should be injected and others should be manually set in code. Read on...