Archive for September, 2009

Patterns of Parallel Programming; “It’s not just a recompile”

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Last week Robert Hess interviewed me for the Knowledge Chamber on Channel 9. We talked about why understanding the fundamentals of patterns for writing parallel software is going to become more and more important over the next few years. Why simply recompiling your code for the latest processor from Intel ...

Conditional Acceptance Tests with xUnit.net

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I’ve been using xUnit.net to run some basic acceptance tests. Obviously xUnit is a unit test framework first and foremost but I don’t have a problem with reusing the framework provided you’re really clear about which tests are unit tests and which tests are not. I created an AcceptanceTest ...

Summer Reading

Friday, September 4th, 2009

It's summer. I travel a bit more for work and take vacation. Both of which means there's more time to be found for reading. I spent a bunch of time sitting in a tent below the north face of Mount Tiedeman waiting for things to cool down ...

Gotchas: MSBuild Conditional Import Ignored by Visual Studio

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Here’s nasty little quirk of MSBuild and Visual Studio which took me some time to solve last night… I have a C# project file which has been modified to import a custom .targets file. This targets file in turn imports some settings (property and item groups) using the following ...

Agile and the Cost of Change Curve

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

  Originally Extreme Programming suggested that the cost of change over the duration of a software project could be “flattened”. “What if the cost of change didn’t rise exponentially over time, but rose much more slowly, eventually reaching an asymptote? … This is one of the premises of XP. It is the ...