I noted this last night from Scott Hanslemans twitter messages and Scott Gu's blog post , it makes a lot of sense that a popular javascript lib have VS support and be included in the MVC framework. What caught my attention the most however was these parts from Scott Gu's announcement. I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the

I've been using a black color scheme in VS ever since Rob released his VibrantInk scheme . Lately however I've been suffering with tired eyes after hours of looking at the screen and decided that I need to make some changes. Beyond the screen flicker rate I also adjusted the scheme as follows Changed font size to 13pt Changed plain text background to RBG (454545) and foreground to RGB (235235235) My aim here was to tone down any glare in the colors to something of a softer tone. The larger font size

Some software approaches run in cycles Gather requirements (sometimes) Write Code Test code (sometimes) Get the requirements wrong and the requirements change midway through writing the code and your writing more code or changing code and the time scale goes up (yes even if the deadline is unmoveable the coders still have to work more hours). Worse yet they change at the testing level and it means more code and yet more testing. Expensive and time consuming when you could use all that to deliver

Martin Woodward has a great article on software estimation, why it is hard and what Agile brings to the table . The approach I have seen the most in the past is the grand old FITA analysis (Finger in The Air) estimate. Get it right and your on time, get it wrong all hell breaks loose (most of which cost money e.g the cost of late delivery, the cost of extra development etc). If the coders finish early then chances are Parkinsons law applies and still costs you. Projects even fail completely or the

I'll be giving a talk on MbUnit at the next ThoughtWorks geek night here in Manchester, UK on the 27th of August . The night will be a double bill, right after me Chris Morris will be leading a workshop designed to find out what you believe quality means in the software you develop. The talk I will give will be a version of the one I gave last year at AgileNorth only updated for the MbUnit v3. The next time I will give this talk will be hopefully DDD towards the end of year , so either vote for me

Picture this, large scale enterprise app, small scale legacy application, third party code...in other words a code base you are not fully familar with and need to understand. Sure enough can apply the feathers rules but if your in a hurrry to understand to understand a code base to start making changes (and a green field option is not an option) then what do you do? I'm on the look out for a tool that can allow you to explore a code base, explore object dependencies and pathways. Ideas welcome.

Jeff Attwood has a post on possibily the greatest man in the computing age, Alan Turing. As Jeff states during WW2 Alan helped break the enigma code and went on to become one of the fore-fathers of AI. There are several books on Alans life that are well worth reading with the Andrew Hodges book one of the best. Alan is one of personal heros, some of Alans greatest work in computing occured in the very place I was born and grew up in. After the war Alan conducted research into computing and maths

This question seems to get asked a lot, this recent article on codeproject does a decent job of explanation as well as this article from Infragistics Guidisan Todd Snyder . If I was sum it up very simply, the different is entry point into the pattern. In MVC the entry point is the controller, if you look at the Microsoft MVC framework for example the controller class is where you bind your view and everything else (model) together. In MVP mean while the entry point is the view, webforms lends it's

For the first time in 7 years of blogging I almost managed no blog posts in a month. I (for fun) graphed the last 12 months of blog posts and sure enough the amount of posts has seen a steady drop. I then graphed all the posts I have made on weblogs.asp.net and since peaking in 2004 I have been on a decline ever since. There are several reasons why, but my now near total flat line needs explanation. With the work/life balance and my new family growing the balance tips in favour of more time with

Lately I've been drafting posts on my daily commute and post them up in batches (just in case you were wondering :). I recall an article (not sure where I read it) about Ron Jeffries and his ability as an 'alpha architect'. Such people are rare, the design they have mostly in their mind with TDD providing a way of slightly reshaping the design and proving the model (in a pair session that can mean validating each other’s ideas). Another kind of folks is the folks that have a general system picture