Around eight years ago I wrote a blog post about Repetitive Strain Injury entitled The Real Pain of Software Development [part 1]. I soon learned the lesson that it’s a bad idea to have “Part 1” in any blog post unless you’ve already written part 2. But here I am, eight years later, finally getting around to part 2.

For a long time, good folks like Matt Podwysocki have extolled the virtues of Reactive Extensions (aka Rx) to me. It piqued my interest enough for me to write a post about it, but that was the extent of it. It sounded interesting, but it didn’t have any relevance to any projects I had at the time.

Changing a big organizations is a slow endeavor. But when people are passionate and persistent, change does happen.

Disclaimer: these opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent the opinion of any person or institution who are not me.

I recently gave my first talk on Git and GitHub to the Dot Net Startup Group about Git and GitHub. I was a little nervous about how I would present Git. At its core, Git is based on a simple structure, but that simplicity is easily lost when you start digging into the myriad of confusing command switches.

Conway’s Law states,

Recently I’ve been tweeting photos of my kids playing with a new toy my wife bought them that I’mthey are totally enthralled with. It’s called the Bildopolis Big Bilder Kit.

Next week Microsoft hosts its annual MVP Summit. So what better time for me to host my first GitHub Drinkup – MVP Edition at the Tap House Grill!

In my previous post, I attempted to make a distinction between Open Source and Open Source Software. Some folks took issue with the post and that’s great! I love a healthy debate. It’s an opportunity to learn. One minor request though. If you disagree with me, I do humbly ask that you read the whole post first before you go and rip me a new one.

UPDATE: I have a follow-up post that addresses a few criticisms of this post.

Recently, the Log4Net team released log4net 1.2.11 (congrats by the way!). The previous version of log4Net was 1.2.10.

I’ve seen a few recent tweets asking about what’s going on with NuGet since I left Microsoft. The fact is that the NuGet team has been hard at work on the release and have been discussing it in various public forums. I think the feeling of “quiet” might be due to the lack of blogging, which I can easily correct right now!

Back in November, someone asked a question on StackOverflow about converting arbitrary binary data (in the form of a byte array) to a string. I know this because I make it a habit to read randomly selected questions in StackOverflow written in November 2011. Questions about text encodings in particular really turn me on.

Birthdays are a funny thing, aren’t they? Let’s look at this tweet for example,

Suppose you have a test that needs to compare strings. Most test frameworks do a fine job with their default equality assertion. But once in a while, you get a case like this:

In the ASP.NET MVC 3 Uservoice site, one of the most voted up items is a suggestion to include an empty project template. No, a really empty project template.

Mary Poppendieck writes the following in Unjust Deserts (pdf), a paper on compensation systems (emphasis mine),

In the past, I’ve tried various schemes to structure my unit tests but never fell into a consistent approach. Pretty much the only rule I had (which I broke all the time) was to write a test class for each class I tested. I would then fill that class with a ton of haphazard test methods.

Happy New Year’s Eve everyone! And by the time you read this, it’ll probably already be the new year. To my friends across the international date line, what is 2012 like? The rest of us will be there soon.

T’is the season for “Year in Review” and “Best of” blog posts. It’s a vain practice, to be sure. This is exactly why I’ve done it almost every year!