I just wanted to take this Remembrance Day opportunity to thank all the Canadian soldiers, past & present, living & dead, along with those of our allies, for your dedication & sacrifice. Thank you for fighting for our liberties so we can worry about the more important things like; litterbugs, dynamic vs. static programming languages, and the endless irrelevant debates about curly braces. This image taken by Andrew...

I am building a web app with Ben Alabaster, and one of the requirements is for the user to be able to flag items for moderators. So the user can flag entity A, entity B, entity C, etc… So I created a single flag table. Which I then tried to tie it to the entity tables, hoping for something like Where all the foreign key relationships were from [flag].[entity_id] to [EntityX].[id] Then when I wanted the top 10 flags from a particular entity (B in this case), I could run a query like select top 20 e.[name], count(*) "count" from entityB as e    left join flag as f     on f.entity_id = e.id where f.entity_type='B' group by e.[name] order by count(*) desc Unfortunately, if you were to create the above table relationship, and run the following inserts insert into EntityA( id, name) values (1, 'EntityA'); insert into EntityB( id, name) values (2, 'EntityB'); insert into EntityC( id, name) values (3, 'EntityC'); insert into EntityD( id, name) values (4, 'EntityD'); The following statement insert into flag(entity_id, flag_reason) values(5, 'Testing without a valid FK value.'); would fail as expected, as expected, with the following error. “The INSERT statement conflicted with the FOREIGN KEY constraint “FK_flag_EntityA”. The conflict...

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...

Yesterday on StackOverflow Johannes Hansen asked What is the acceptable upper limit of time allocated to a single development task? I answered with If you track your estimate/actual history, you can probably plot hours by accuracy and figure out exactly what number is appropriate for your team. My advice sounded so good I thought I’d try it myself. So I opened bug tracker where I keep track of my probable and actual times and exported my closed bugs to Excel. I cleaned up a bit, by removing any rows with either a 0 probable or actual time, then created a chart. Now when I conceived of this idea, I was expecting something like Well I wasn’t expecting the plots to be that dense, or to accelerate above 200% so fast, but let’s just say, that general look would have been pleasing to my eye. Here’s what I got instead. Now, I’ve got to say, is NOT what I was expecting at all. You can kind of see a very dense block under 4 hours and 100%, but doesn’t tell us very much with regards to the relationship between estimation accuracy and size of the tasks. So, I then threw a Linear Regression Trendline on...

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...