Nappi Sight

"…business staff think we can load up technical debt because they never truly see the consequences. But those consequences are there…they are just never expressed in a way that the business staff can engage with" -Steve McConnell WCF is Dead.  Long live WCF! – Low budget recording of Monty’s (IDesign) presentation to a user group on simplifying WCF and the “the message is the application”. Solving the database deployment problem with Database Lifecycle Management – I’m intrigued. Scott Hanselman's Complete List of Productivity Tips What the f*** were they thinking?! Crazy website biases exposed by naughty words lists (the NSFW version) – Troy Hunt identify sites weird attempts to prevent offensive words in passwords. Code Hoarders – Uncle Bob identifies more about unclean coding practices. Personal Productivity: Business vs. busyness vs. laziness - "Excessive busy-ness is a common form of laziness." Secrets of Handling Support in an Agile Team T

“Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.” — Decluttering the company [The Economist] SlowCheetah is going into maintenance mode How to run Background Tasks in ASP.NET – Hanselman points out a few utilities that can be used to run background jobs on an interval within an ASP.NET app. Introducing Azure DocumentDB – Microsoft’s fully managed NoSQL document database service Azure DocumentDB – Ayende of RavenDB assesses the technology. The <%: mystring %> syntax in ASP.NET 4 is equivalent to <%= Server.HtmlEncode (

Going back, maybe ten years ago, when I first read Kent Becks Extreme Programming I found it compelling. Most of the practices made immediate intuitive sense.  I especially liked the practices:  coding standards, unit testing, refactoring, continuous integration, collective code ownership, code reviews and maintaining a sustainable pace. They are now engrained in the way we operate.  What was appealing about them was that they were directly applicable to the practice of programming.  I could and did begin adopting them in some part as an individual to develop my own development skills, quality and productivity.  There was no need for a formal organizational structure or project management philosophy overhaul required in order to just start doing some of the practices and benefitting from the discipline.  Extreme programming is a methodology as the name implies, for programmers.  Later, as I became more aware of broader Agile, the myriad of Agile practices felt like watered down versi

“Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a [sic] frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded [sic] detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.”—Linds Redding   ASP.NET vNext: the future of .NET on the Server Announcing the Release of ASP.NET MVC 5.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1 ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory – An ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype – Dino Esposito outlines the four aspects of Caching with a good explanation of each. Top "Must Know" Frameworks for .NET web developers foc.us is a tDCS headse

“Quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care—not just of any great method that descends from the heavens. That these acts are simple doesn’t mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy” – Uncle Bob Error logging and tracking done right with Raygun.io – Troy Hunt reviews RayGun.io Benefits of Continuous Deployment Technology Radar – This is extremely informative. Thoughworks evaluates technology based on whether they think its ready to adopt, trial (almost ready), assess (evaluate), or hold (not ready for use).  Interestingly, TFS is a Hold. Use Frequent Branches to Tell a Story and Simplify Code Reviews – Sounds familiar. Avoid the pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern – This also sounds familiar, in that it was something we abandon long ago. Unusual Ways of Boosting Up App Performance. Strings The JavaScript Alternatives – About things like CoffeeScript, TypeScript and Dart to make javascript easier and cleaner. Largest collection of

“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” – Melvin Conway Revisiting Conway's law – “if you want cohesive and decoupled systems, put different teams at work on each of them, so that the communication structures of the teams resemble what you want to achieve with projects…Segregation of responsibilities starts by our own work organization" Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: "A Test of the "Mirroring" Hypothesis – Harvard Business school study. Software Structure Can Reduce Costs and Time-to-Market – “the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…when the structure of the code b

“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” – Melvin Conway Revisiting Conway's law – “if you want cohesive and decoupled systems, put different teams at work on each of them, so that the communication structures of the teams resemble what you want to achieve with projects…Segregation of responsibilities starts by our own work organization" Software Structure Can Reduce Costs and Time-to-Market – “the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…the structure of software largely determines how long it takes and how expensive it is to develop, test, extend, and maintain a software system…when the structure of the code base significantly impedes the time of subsequent deliveries of the right features, a business’s competitive agility is lost and the Return on Investment on the s

“Quality is the result of a million selfless acts of care—not just of any great method that descends from the heavens. That these acts are simple doesn’t mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy” – Uncle Bob   What's culture got to do with it – Looks like Cooper is offering a Culture Master class. This training aims to help people intentionally approach their team or organizational culture. An Overview of Project Katana - Whereas both the OWIN specification and Owin.dll are community owned and community run open source efforts, the Katana project represents the set of OWIN components that, while still open source, are built and released by Microsoft. These components include both infrastructure components, such as hosts and servers, as well as functional components, such as authentication components and bindings to frameworks such as SignalR and  ASP.NET Web API. Microsoft claims Azure now used by half of the Fortune 500 Duplicate Finder, Part

“Most managers want good code, even when they are obsessing about the schedule. They may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that’s their job. It’s your job to defend the code with equal passion” – Bob Martin IE -Tracking Protection Lists - IE has the a bunch of tracking prevention providers. What’s the Problem with Mobile HTML5 -“A recent research concludes that contrary to the general belief performance is not the main problem with HTML5 but rather the missing of profiling and debugging tools and the lack of certain APIs” Organization Antipattern: Project Teams – This post explored the “No Project” movement and compares the Project team vs. Product Team construction. Is College Worth It? The New Turbo Button - Balancing Power Management and Performance on Windows Servers -“Recently Mike Harder, a development manager, noticed that stuff he does every day was taking longer on the "Balanced" power option than the "High Performance" option”

-“The best way to motivate geeks is to not demotivate them” BoundedContext -Martin Fowler explains the concept of the Bounded Context. Clean Code Cheet Sheet - A cheat sheet for all of the principles and guidance for righting Clean Code. Applying the 80:20 Rule in Software Development - Various ways the 80/20 rule applies to software development. Technical Disobedience – “In software, it is far to easy to accept the system around you as status quo. It is harder to realize that software is soft, and that systems can be soft as well. There are many small rules you can try and hack around to get things done.” The future of the business desktop - Rocky’s thoughts on the desktop PC and its position within the enterprise and what that means as a platform for enterprise developers. Why teams don't work - Harvard Business journal about team dynamics. Victory Lap for Ask Patents – Joel Spolsky’s anti patent troll effort. Singing the Password Blues -“Passwords are so 1999, and dua

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” - C.A.R. Hoare (British computer scientist, winner of the 1980 Turing Award) On Types – Ted Neward makes in interesting suggestion about how types should be handled. As a suggestion, then, I throw out this idea: Ensure that all of your domain classes never expose primitive types to the user of the system. In other words, Name never exposes an “int” for Age, but only an “Age” type. C# makes this easy via “using” declarations, like so: using FirstName = System.String; using LastName = System.String; Web Developer Checklist – This is a very handy and thorough checklist of items to be checked on you website for quality, security, usability, etc. ';--have i been pwned? – Troy Hunt has set up a sight that allows you to see