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Most in demand technical skills in the IT industry today

mattcalla — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:04:00 GMT

Long time, no speak...err post. Anyway its good to be back, I've been out of action for a while off doing some other projects, however I'm back and ready to rumble again.A quick one to get things started again: I've always liked to dabble in technologies ...

Melbourne Developer SIG review: Creating Applications in Windows Azure:

mattcalla — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:23:00 GMT

Last night I attended a Developer SIG meeting at the Microsoft Theatre in Melbourne. The presenter was David Lemphers from the Microsoft Windows Azure team. The presentation gave a walkthrough of how to create .NET applications for the Azure platform, and an overview of the cloud architecture.

My impressions after a day of reflection on the ...

SpecUnit - make your tests more readable

mattcalla — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:21:00 GMT

Thought I'd start the year of by sharing this good little add-on for unit testing that I came across recently.
If you are unit testing with NUnit in .NET 3.5 - this may be of
interest to you. Its an add-on called 'SpecUnit' which basically
enables you to write your tests with a more fluent interface - so that
your tests read more like ...

Public Variables - Are they really that bad?

mattcalla — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:20:00 GMT

I get this thought every now and then - should Public Variables be avoided in all situations? I was recently writing a quick prototype application, and had a few "data objects" which I noticed myself spending alot of time writing get/set properties. I then proceded to get rid of them all, and revert to just simple public variables.

There was ...

Fluent Interface: Has wikipedia missed the mark on this one?

mattcalla — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:49:00 GMT

I was just reading Martin Fowlers article on Fluent Interfaces .

I then decided to check out Wikipedia's page on it - it seems to me that the example of fluent interface there is just a classic case of method chaining. The impression I got from Fowler was that the "fluency" comes more from the language used ...

TDD / BDD Example

mattcalla — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:05:00 GMT

Developing using TDD is more about the developer’s mindset rather than the tools and technologies that are used. However we still need to write some actual code, and that’s where a whole range of both commercial and open source tools come into play.

There are two main tools that you will need to be able to write tests effectively:

1. ...

Stored Procedures Should Be Stupid

mattcalla — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:08:00 GMT

Stored procs should be ignorant, obedient and just plain down right stupid. We don't want them to ask questions, make decisions or do anything other than what we tell them. If they start doing anything other than CRUD operations, then you can quickly find yourself in a whole world of T-SQL pain.

What am I talking about here? The database making ...

TDD ... Time Saving Development

mattcalla — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I've been asked by some work colleagues to produce a short demo/presentation about TDD, so to get my mind into gear, I thought I put all my thoughts (and the thoughts of others) down on my blog and see if it provokes any feedback that can improve my presentation. I really think about TDD as not so much Test Driven, ...

WPF (XBAP) using WCF in a Partial Trust Environment

mattcalla — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:07:00 GMT

I've just gone through the pain of working out how to get my WPF Browser Application (XBAP) using a WCF service without any security exceptions causing me to attempt to break yet another desk. After hours of frustration I've finally got it working: A WPF Browser application, talking to a WCF service seamlessly and with no security issues. In an ...

WPF Browser Application Cache Problems

mattcalla — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:17:00 GMT

If you're having issues with your WPF Browser app's having old versions being cached - most noticeably during development, when you make a change, debug the app from Visual Studio (by pressing F5) and your changes do not appear in the version loaded in your browser - then you will need to clear your Application Cache before your new version ...