One of the more difficult things to manage in software projects is often changing a database schema over time. On the projects that I work on, we don't usually have DBAs who manage the schema so it is left up to the developers to figure out. The other thing you ...

I am a generalist. I like Ruby and Groovy, Rails and Grails, Objective C and Python sometimes. I use bash scripts and I use Java and .NET too. I work on a MacBook Pro running OS X and a Thinkpad running Windows XP. I run my server on Ubuntu Linux. ...

Wikipedia defines a mixin as "a class that provides a certain functionality to be inherited by a subclass, but is not meant to stand alone. Inheriting from a mixin is not a form of specialization but is rather a means to collect functionality. A subclass may even choose to inherit ...

Dan wrote a post about ALT.NET in Milwaukee. Basically the idea of ALT.NET is to take the best practices from software development, to find the best tools available in .NET regardless of the vendor and to use them when they make sense. Some people see the term as divisive. As ...

This is a followup to my previous post on integrating ObjectBuilder and ASP.NET. As I was playing around with the solution I hit on the fact that I was only injecting at the Page level. As ASP.NET is a component model, you can end up with custom User Controls that ...

ObjectBuilder is a .NET framework made for building Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection containers. Unlike Spring or Pico, ObjectBuilder is not a full DI framework, instead it's a framework for building DI solutions. Yes, that's incredibly weird to me too. Why Use Object Builder? Why would you use ObjectBuilder instead of ...

NUnit is my Unit Testing tool of choice for .NET development. Microsoft provides a unit testing framework but it only works with some higher-end versions of Visual Studio. They're so similar that it's almost ridiculous that Microsoft created their own version. (See one of my previous posts for more information on ...

.NET provides a whole slew of utilities for serializing objects into an XML form. But as I wrote in my previous post, .NET Compact Framework has serious problems with this serialization. The good news is that you can leverage all of the existing Attributes and tricks that you think should ...

XML Serialization in the .NET Compact Framework seems to be buggy enough that it is generally not useful if you need to serialize a class that conforms to a schema of some sort. If all you need to do is serialize and deserialize representations of a class you are probably ...

I've written previously about using MSBuild With Nunit as well as a bit of a Manifesto on Relentless Build Automation. I believe that automating the build and deployment process is a necessary step to ensure the reliable delivery of quality software. Release Management One of the things that we as software ...