Writing Archive
Older posts, kept for reference.
Older technical writing from earlier stages of my career. Some posts may be dated, but they remain here for reference.
Outside the shack, or “How to be a gigolo” On UI Testing CQRS recap, or “How to resuscitate” Cron and AppEngine The Economics of Ergonomics Audit Fields in Google AppEngine The other side of AppEngine QA: A Hillbilly Love Story AppEngine thoughts Deploying a new version of a GWT app Staying home for the night Designing an API: Is JSON/JSONP an and/or decision? An Apple Account, or “How to try to change your ways” Using AppEngine (and GWT) in a CI environment Deciding on technology? It depends, or “How to GWT off” Tips for UI Tests with GWT: HTML IDs, or “How to buy votes” Google UI Faux Pas, or “How to show love, Hillbilly-style” Brownfield Application Development, one year later How to strip away the super powers of borders in IE Tip for running GWT UI tests in CI, or “How to be ignorant without the bliss” Thinking about the user, or “How to consider the experience” Running cucumber tests against GWT/AppEngine in TeamCity, or “How to CI with A reason to UI test, or “How to fill in the gaps” Command pattern architecture, or “How to do it a little at a time” Release management, or “How to de-version your app” Options for upgrading an App Engine application BookedIN.net Relationships in BigTable, or “How to put extra effort into being lazy” Launching beta, or “How to decide when and where to cut corners” Tools for disparate teams: AgileZen Edition Using an NHibernate Formula to aid searching YouTrack for OSS Projects, or “How to broadcast your issues” Why Java?, or “How to describe a decision process” Automating browser actions with Vimium and AutoHotKey Rietveld update, or “How to make code reviews fun (without canceling them)” Rietveld, or “How to revamp your code review process” Commands in GWT, or “How to dispatch your async to the handler and register Multi-tenancy, or “How to make GWT communal” Defect culture, or “How to broach quality” The search interface, or “How to find people” Architectural changes, or “How to decide if and when to start over” Priority management, or “Why do you do that thing that you do?” The why of writing, or “How to acknowledge your betters” MIX OpenRasta sample available for download Passivity, or “How to help your views leave the nest” The usefulness of interaction tests, or “How to question the method” BigTable concerns, or “How to put your trust in the cloud” Security in GWT, or “How to lay the foundation” CI and Google App Engine, or “How to force your way in” Report cards, or “How to grade a grading system” CodeBetter CI Server update, or “How to plead your case” gwt-presenter, or “How to get excited about MVP” Life outside .NET, or “How to check out your neighbours” Open Rasta presentation, or “How to throw a rest into the mix” Consulting vs. Employee-hood, or “How to consider your options” OR-ing criteria with NHibernate, or “How to include it all” Revisiting “Maintainable for whom?”, or “How to justify your crap” Civil communication, or “How to ensure your message is ignored” TeamCity/CodeBetter PSA, or “How to disguise your intentions” TeamCity and CodeBetter update, or “How to move past the honeymoon phase” Using AutoHotKey to map the Ctrl key, or “How to Ctrl your closure” Search functionality: heavy on the research, light on the development Lucene.net vs. Indexing Services, or “How to conquer your fear of index management” Death of a user group, or “How to give up” Piquing curiosity, or “How to scratch the surface” Gondorff and Hooker vs. Butch and Sundance Compile => CI => Tests, or "How to compile first, test later Unflattening a list, or "How to ask 'how to' Fluent Sharp NHibernate Persistence Configuration, or “How to build credibility Who’s payin’ the bills?, or “How to drive a stake in the ground” Becoming a better developer, or “How to sidestep a question” T before A, except after Views Delayed execution with yield, or “How to abdicate, cede, and relent” Refactoring guard clauses, or “How to ask politely” Branching out, or “How to live life outside ASP.NET MVC” Zip codes aren’t that important, or “How to stop going postal” Problem of having too many options And you opened your mouth…why?, or “How to comment for the greater good” Mindless vs. Mindful Meetings, or “How to think before you meet” The insurance of software, or “How to take joy in being risk-averse” Re-review of Kinesis Development Project Archetypes, or “How to pigeon-hole” OpenRasta, or “How to speak REST” JsUnit and NAnt, or “How to automate JavaScript testing for fun and/or profit” Kinesis Advantage Review #1, or “How to relearn how to tysppe” ViEmu/ReSharper update Quick Cyclomatic Complexity Question ViEmu and ReSharper, or “How to tone down your highlights” NInject Contextual Binding, or “How to defy Mick Jagger and always get what MVC ViewPage Compile Error, or “How to exist in both places” The Pewter Scale, or “How to Maintain Your Balance” NAnt on Windows Server 2008 64-bit with .NET 3.5 Experimenting with virtual hard drives Getting used to working with VMs Configuring Livelink on IIS7 The Wacky World of Personal Finance Software NHibernate Profiler: Minute 15 Many-to-many relationships with data attached in NHibernate An investigation into routes ASP.NET MVC and the GAAAK! How do you tame the many heads of the hydra? Overview and review of S#arp Architecture Pimpin' DevTeach Coding with a net: An anecdote DevTeach presentations explained Sharing code styles in ReSharper Epiphany on a plumber ASP.NET MVC and jQuery can now produce legitimate offspring Can you refactor to MVC? ASP.NET MVC Sample Project: Suvius.Flamingo Do the right thing. Assuming you know what that is. Feeling out Bahamas Code Camp possibilities MVC vs. MVP: A Hillbilly''s Journey BahaNET meeting this Thursday, September 11 Becoming a remote developer Revisiting the onion So...that happened Learn HTML. But only if you want to. Random responses to MVC comments The HTML Theme: Please don''t let me be misunderstood Going full circle with TDD Incarceration Log - Day 4 Adding a customer field to a UI: Proposed solution Adding a customer field to a UI Trying to access Windows Search from SQL Server: An Appeal Review of the Check-In Dance Alt.net Canada Open Spaces is now taking requests BahaNET meeting and .NET Rocks London alt.net Beers - Recap [Rehash] Canadian Taxes for Non-Residents Be it ever so humble... SimpleStateMachine on CodePlex Close everything and unzip all BahaNET Meeting 2 - We Hardly Knew Ye DimeCasts.NET "Server cannot modify cookies" error in ASP.NET MVC Florida Tweener weekend Auto-registration in ASP.NET MVC Researching search Sparring before DevTeach Good Gestalt! BahaNET Meeting 1: A Recap Twas the day of the first BahaNet meeting... Bahamas .NET User Group - April 30 What do you do if you're Salieri? Deserializing JSON into a list of abstract base classes There's a voice... How to convince your boss to let you go to DevTeach On diving into NHibernate jQuery and the ConventionController Who's the next guy? Linq to NHibernate - The Day After Trying out Linq for NHibernate Brownfield Application Development in .NET RedirectToAction in Filter Attributes Table-per-concrete-class in NHibernate? TestControllerBuilder in MvcContrib Serializing to client script NHibernate error while adding a collection to an object Testing RedirectToAction in ASP.NET MVC Auto-generated vs. human-generated IDs Client-side scripting, eight years on Passing objects to controller actions in ASP.NET MVC Automated deployments Automated releases (with a touch of deployments) Getting ASP.NET MVC to do the dirty work The Bahamas .NET User Group Solution folders AutoMockingContainer and ASP.NET MVC: Round 2 You broke the build! How do you build your application? Splitter bars: Not for the farsighted Presentation tips Dust off the credit card South Florida CodeCamp Wrap-up Career Opportunities in the Bahamas: Don''t get your hopes up yet CruiseControl, VS2008 and ASP.NET MVC West Palm Beach and the Fluent URLs Link: Top 10 Estimation Best Practices NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Upcoming speaking engagements Why not remote developers? Fighting the remote mindset AutoMockingContainer and ASP.NET MVC: Round 1 BDD-style specification reporting in CC.Net Goodwill and Career Security Hiding code from ReSharper Model-View-Presenter in an MDI Monitoring code coverage, or "How to descend into madness On Brownfield applications, or "How to ring in the new year on a positive note Database refactoring, or "How to remove a schema MbUnit fixtures, or "How to make your tests pass through attribute attrition Removing #regions, or "How to keep your code expanded" ClassTester, or "How to exercise your assembly Test SetUp Methods, or "How to make yourself public Refactoring by rote, or "How to have a ReSharper Orgy! Guerrilla refactoring, or "How to bring down a totalitarian regime The CodeBetter Hillbilly, or "How to build a better banjo Getting the word out, or "How to plan ahead DevTeach: Days 3 and 4, or "How to double back" Do Androids Dream of Electric Monorails (While They're Hibernating)? DevTeach Wrap-up, or "How to freeze your @$$ off DevTeach: Day 2, or "How to present for style" Part 3: Annotated Timok Project, or "How to get rendered" DevTeach: The Arrival, or "How to descend" NHibernate white space, or "How to make give your error messages good gestalt Plug-in-based applications, or "How to sell a shell Testing your fallacies, or "How to fix a bug once and only once Vista and Office 2007, or "How to get a real user's perspective Part 2: Annotated Timok Project, or "How to secure your home" ASP.NET AJAX Gotchas, or "How to fix mistakes by changing frameworks ALT.NET discussion group, or "How to keep up with the big boys Part 1: Annotated Timok Project, or "How to know what you''re rendering" Remote meetings, or "How to reach out and touch someone On working remotely, or "How to justify your existence Microsoft SharedView Beta, or "How to present your desktop Remote pairing tools, or "How to pair in your pajamas ALT.NET, or "How to be conscientious as an alternative ASP.NET Debugging, or "How to get attached #Regions, or "How to disorganize your code" Landing remote contracts, or "How to make friends MSMVC and Monorail, or "How to react and adapt ALT.NET, Day Three, or "How to jump into the fray ALT.NET, Day Two, or "How to be a domain-specific, behaviour-driven, controlling ALT.NET Day One, or "How to mingle Searching and restricting documents, or "How to build a search engine that Startup time, or "How to provoke feelings of inadequacy in your hardware AutoHotKey, the Saviour! or "How to return from the abyss Chronicles of a remote developer, or "How to find the gray cloud under the Silverlight Sequel, or "How to prevent animal abuse UI Options, or "How to architect like a kid in a candy store Project floater role, or "How to make a new friend ev'ry stop you make Collapsing a CollapsiblePanel programmatically, or "How to condescend Crash avoidance, or "How to bail from a sinking ship Nullable types, or "How to make your tests pass by switching testing frameworks UI-Driven Design, or "How to start at the screen Tabbed Interfaces, or "How to preach to the masses MbUnit Filters, or "How to be implicitly explicit Silverlight, or "How to question your prognostication skills Namespaces in Ajax Controls, or "How to fear the dot Moving projects in TFS, or "How to become intimate with the rollback feature Couple o' tools, or "How to write notes across two monitors CruiseControl and DBProj, or "How to use DataDude projects on a build server Taxes in Canada, or "How to pay your country without actually living there Funky Formatting, or "How to freak out your IDE AutoHotKey, or "How to make the keyboard your b**** Nothin' But .NET, or "How to justify ignoring your home life QLiner HotKeys, or "How to drop two keystrokes ReSharper Delimiters, or "How to give your code some space Client-side ASP.NET AJAX, or "How to keep tabs on your AJAX animation Excluding WebResource.axd, or "How to initially compress what you want Blowery.web and ASP.NET AJAX, or "How to mediate 'twixt compressors VisualSVN and Office 2007, or "How to crash an IDE Testing Repositories, or "How to make sure your fakes are adequately tested ActiveRecord Queries, or "How to Query Deep Office and Zune Sidebar .NET Providers, or "How to Be Secure On Your Own Terms Genres, or "How to Remove Value From A Value Object Initial Flamingo Setup, or "How to Get Started Online Professional Development or, "How to Bring a Flamingo Back to Life Remote Requirements Gathering, or "How to Remove All Direct Human Contact from Windows Desktop Search performance Quick Launch, or "How to Encroach on a Hillbilly's Taskbar Ajax Toolkit Extenders, or "How to Butcher Your HTML For The Sake Of Usability HTML/CSS Interlude Globalization, or "How to Treat Latin America Like a Second-Class Customer Web Application Projects, or "How to Break a Build With aspnet_compiler Rhino Fakes, or "How to Create Fake Objects In Rhino Mocks On TDD, or "How To Flipflop Ignorance as a software design methodology Rhino Mocks, or "How to Explain the Introductory Chapter of a Mock Framework Save the Developer. Save the World IWizard, or "How to Ask for Class Project Templates, or "How to Become Classless Calgary Code Camp Infiltration Subversion, or "How I Learned to Almost Care About Source Control NCover hanging in NAnt task Refactoring to Model-View-Presenter Model View(s) Presenter(s)? Nested Master Pages and Intellisense The niceties of calling a help desk Coding Hillbilly: Reflector User How to make Excel 2003 GPF Excel *shall* be released Excel freezes after working with spreadsheets within a .NET app Updates to RoundedCornersExtender On Livelink Bugs EasyLAPI for .NET Configuration handler issue More on the DevExpress XtraGrid Settings in VS2005 XtraGrid Tips ReSharper: No Comment PowerPoint file sizes PMS-ing On Livelink Development New Flamingo New properties on the RoundedCornersExtender Issue with adding a TextboxWatermark client-side AJAX/Atlas, Atlas/AJAX Javascript references in Atlas Adding Atlas Toolkit Extenders to dasBlog Themes Atlas and dasBlog 1.9: The better way These new monitoring tools are double-plus good, ain't they, Jed? Creating Atlas Control Extenders client-side So you want to search this thing, too? New Atlas Control Toolkit CTP Pagination in Livelink More Atlas Extenders in dasBlog Atlas and dasBlog, together at last! Max-width in IE Adding Atlas to dasBlog (almost) Atlas Error with TextBoxWatermarkExtender and AutoCompleteExtender dasBlog: One Week After Performance check: Interacting with Excel from C# Primary Interop Assembly troubles with VSTO2005 Good Gestalt Conscientious Coding is the new TDD Adventures in Atlas Extenders: Part 3 What the UpdatePanel doesn't do Creating an Atlas Extender: Part 2.1 Creating an Atlas Extender: Part Two Creating an Atlas Extender: Part One Controls in UpdatePanels may not cause a postback Atlas Shrugged Building a search page, Part 2: The SQL It ain't SQL Server unless it includes Profiler To search, perchance to find Building a search page, Part 1 Taking toolbars to task Maybe someday I'll actually write some code For sale: one slightly-used but still gallant software developer The Clown Car of .NET 2.0 Examples INNER JOINs are your friends An Alternative SharePoint Development Environment Laziness as a coding methodology Coding under the influence SQL: It''s still smarter than Bush