How to hook up NUnit as an option in the ASP.NET MVC application wizard
Ben Alabaster and I have started a project, lets call it Project X for now (original eh? ;-). Anyway, we have decided to blog about its development. I will be posting something in the next few days, and Ben just published his first post “How do I hook my version of nUnit into the ASP.NET MVC template?“. Here’s a blurb: If you’ve been looking for a way to integrate nUnit into your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 template – that is, when you create a new ASP.NET MVC application and it asks you if you’d like to create a test project, nUnit shows up in the list along with the usual Visual Studio Unit Test option. There are a number of longwinded ways of doing things. There’s also a relatively simple way touted on the Visual Web Developer Team Blog which I’ll spare you the headache of running it and finding the same problems I did…. Ben’s post can be found on his blog... read moreInvestigating the relationship between estimation accuracy and task size
2 Rules for a Happy Client while Billing Hourly
Some of my projects are a fixed rate and some are hourly. If the scope of the project is small enough to accurately estimate, risks are minimal, and nailing down requirements is practical, I may propose a fixed price. Working on fixed price projects are a piece of cake, I go home, work on it, provide periodic updates via email, phone, or in person. When I finish it I install it and give them a CD with all the binaries, documentation, and source code. However, I’ve found working on an hourly rate to be a little different than doing all the above while just counting my hours. There is a lot of distrust with hourly professionals which is only compounded with a mysterious process like software development. After all how do they know you aren’t home watching soap operas, working on your own projects, the project of another client, or even sitting on the beach? How can they tell they aren’t being over charged? The problem with trust, is even if you are honest, a false perception can still destroy the relationship. I know this too well. Once in the late 1990s I was working from home, charging hourly, and I got a call from one of the newer partners of my biggest client (only client at that point). While talking I rebooted to clean out my system* and when the system came back up it played the 20th Century Fox theme, a configuration change I thought was very cool, and he said ‘Are you watching TV?’ I said ‘No. Why?’ … Seriously, I didn’t even making the connection. Two days later I was called in for an unscheduled meeting where my invoices were questioned, I heard a lot of “we’re not accusing your of inflating your hours…”, and the next day, feeling insulted and unappreciated, I resigned. I didn’t make the obvious connection until much later. It doesn’t matter that I was under charging both in terms of my rate and what I charged for, and would never inflate my hours! It doesn’t matter, because the perception was corrupted. It was a tragic misunderstanding since I loved working there and provided a competent, yet naively discounted service. That’s when I came up with rule # 1 1. Work at the client site when charging hourly. While following this rule gave my clients assurance that I was actually working, it still left them in the dark as to my... read moreA very simple Pair Programming IP Rights Agreement
Once in 1998, I sat down with my manager (the only manager I’ve ever had who could program), and we banged out some code for about 2 days. It was a very fast paced synergistic activity where one idea fed another and at the end of 2 days our initial idea morphed into something completely different and a heck of a lot better. Well, tonight 11 years later, I’ve convinced my colleague Ben Alabaster to come over and pair program. I don’t know how it will go, I’ve got high hopes, but I am confident at the end of the night both Ben and myself will be a little better as programmers, and might have even started something worth finishing. But two things I do know: 1) if we come up with something good, we’re both going to want to use it. And 2) if we ever get to the point of needing an agreement outlining our IP rights, it will be too late to draft one. So, Ben & I threw together some basic rules yesterday. Frankly, I’m surprised I couldn’t find any on the net already, maybe I over think this stuff more than most people, or perhaps it’s because I just didn’t look that hard. So here’s what we agreed to: Each of us, individually, is free to use any programming concept shared, discovered, or created. Each of us, individually, is free to use anything we cocreate as part of a larger project with a significant amount of additional functionality. This can be a personal project, business project, or consulting project. Each of us must agree to release any code or binaries either as a commercial product or open source. Each of us will share any credit and/or financial profits equally. I’d love to hear other people’s perspective and comments about this. Copyright © John MacIntyre 2009, All rights... read more11 Personal Programming Assumptions That Were Incorrect
Today I got side tracked and spent an unreasonable amount of time on StackOverflow.com. One of the questions I was looking at was What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect?
Many of the answers immediately resonated with me, like Instantsoup’s answer That people knew what they wanted and JohnFx’s awesome answer about comparing his knowledge to the collective knowledge of all other programmers. Other answers reflected a poor initial understanding of the language or technology, many of these I was fortunate enough to not relate to.
As you can imagine, I immediately started coming up with my own answers, so I continued reading to make sure they weren’t already there. But as I read, I came up with more initial assumptions which proved to be false. I thought I’d pick out the best, and answer with that one, but realized I had a whole blog post!
So without further ado; here is my list of assumptions about programming and the industry which proved to be incorrect: …
read moreAboutMe.xml
I have a pet peeve and like most pet peeves it’s an irrelevant petty little annoyance, not quite a huge, humanity, oppressing problem.
My pet peeve is filling out the same information; name, address, city, etc… on paper forms. All that standard information at every doctor’s office, school, activity registration form for my kids, etc… I mean why do I need to keep writing this stuff? And why does somebody else have to take the time to retype it into their system?
Really! In all seriousness … what a waste of time! 5 minutes I’ll never get back, every time I start a new relationship with any organization.
But wait … I have a vision! Not a big glorious, save humanity vision, it’s more of a save each person 5 minutes of writers cramp, kind of vision. Yes! That kind of glorious vision! …
read more6 simple steps to a stress free database change deployment
… Deployments can be a real headache at the best of times, but especially when schema updates to a production database are involved. Don’t get me wrong, you usually have a backup to fall back on, but how long will that take to restore? … Really, you don’t want to resort to the restore, have the database offline for that long, or have your name associated to it. So gradually I evolved a process which has kept me sane and confident when deploying schema changes to production servers, even on large, sensitive, and active databases….
read moreTwitter users need a Valet Key for 3rd Party Tools
I’m noticing a lot of Twitter tools requiring the user to enter their Twitter user id and password to use the tool. These tools obviously need the users’ credentials to access the Twitter API and act on behalf of the user.
But am I the only one who is uncomfortable with this? I mean, isn’t the first rule of passwords not to give them out to anybody? Isn’t it?!?!?
Instead it’s become the acceptable practice to enter it into every app requesting it! Correct me if I’m wrong …..
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Senior Software Consultant working in the Toronto area. I specialize in Microsoft technologies and have a long history of taking software development projects from idea, through development and implementation, and years of maintenance.
Always looking for interesting projects. 