Blogs

I’ve decided that immersion is the best way for me to learn new programming concepts. My exposure to WPF came 4 years ago when I started at a new employer and was told that my first assignment was to learn the application codebase and create a WPF Datagrid that could display data from our application (the view of the data was dynamically composed using metadata from an EAV database). Needless to say, the effort helped bring me up to speed quickly with both the internal codebase and WPF.

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I was recently asked to build up a Silverlight tool to show a file full of addresses on a map. I decided to use the Silverlight bing maps control and I must say I was not disappointed with it's functionality. It ended up being extremely simple. The tools used to create this were VS2010, Silverlight 4, Bing maps Silverlight control, and the Bing maps web services.

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This is something that I’m surprised isn’t included in the framework out of the box. When using the Distinct Query operator, one of the overloads takes an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. There is friction in creating a separate IEqualityComparer<T>...

With its noticeable absence from PDC 2008 and 2009, it appeared that Windows Mobile had all but been abandoned. Yes and no. Windows Mobile is no more . Say hello to Windows Phone. The opening keynote for Mix 2010 was all about Windows Phone 7. If it weren...

I came across two interesting items on the web today. The first was Rocky Lhotka’s mCSLA series in which he presents a DSL over CSLA. I know, I know but let’s put our opinions about CSLA aside and look at the really important point. Here is a sample of...

I was going to talk about how my digital cleanse reminds me of a macro scale Pomodoro. Then I realized that I never really talked about the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique is a method for getting organized and being focused. It is a time management system created by Franesco Cirillo. I’m going to let him tell you how he came up with the concept:

One day in the classroom on campus where I used to study, I watched my classmates with a critical eye, and then looked even more critically at myself: how I got myself organized, how I interacted with others, how I studied. It was clear to me that the high number of distractions and interruptions and the low level of concentration and motivation were at the root of the confusion I was feeling.

So I made a bet with myself, as helpful as it was humiliating: “Can you study – really study - for 10 minutes?” I needed objective validation, a Time Tutor, and I found one in a kitchen timer shaped like a pomodoro (the Italian for tomato) – in other words, I found my “Pomodoro”.

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Not too long ago, I responded to the reaction that many had to Joel Spolsky’s article “ The Duct Tape Programmer ”. My belief still remains that people missed the point due to the unfortunate titling (as well as the severe dating of the technologies mentioned...