You don’t so much return from Las Vegas as you recover from Las Vegas.

One interesting response to my series on versioning of interfaces and abstract base classes is the one in which someone suggested that we should go ahead and break their code from version to version. They’re fine in requiring a recompile when upgrading.

Eilon Lipton recently wrote a bit about context objects in ASP.NET MVC and in an “Oh by the way” moment, tossed out the fact that we changed the IHttpContext interface to the HttpContextBase abstract base class (ABC for short).

This is part 2 in an ongoing series in which I talk about various design and versioning issues as they relate to Abstract Base Classes (ABC), Interfaces, and Framework design. In part 1 I discussed some ways in which ABCs are more resilient to versioning than interfaces. I haven’t covered the full story yet and will address some great points raised in the comments.

By the way my blogging frequency has declined, you can guess I’ve been quite busy here at Microsoft preparing for the next release of ASP.NET MVC.

UPDATE: I improved this based on some feedback in my comments.

If you know me, you know I go through great pains to write automated unit tests for my code. Some might even call me anal about it. Those people know me too well.

At the risk of embarrassing myself and eliciting more groans, I am going to share a joke I made up for my Code Camp talk. I was inspired to come up with some humor based on Jeff’s Sesame Street Presentation Rule post. I fully understand his post was addressing something deeper than simply telling a gratuitous joke in the presentation.

The ASP.NET and Silverlight team are hiring! Brad Abrams (who happens to be my “grand-boss” as in my boss’s boss) posted a developers wanted ad on his blog:

The Seattle Code Camp (which despite the misleading photo, isn’t a camping trip) is now over and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of talks but did enjoy the xUnit.net talk by Jim Newkirk and Brad Wilson. I’m a fan of their approach to providing extensibility and this session provided all the impetus I needed to really give xUnit.net a try rather than simply talking about trying it. :)

Well today I turn old. 33 years old to be exact. A day after Hanselman turns really old. It seems I’m always following in that guy’s footsteps doesn’t it?

In a recent post, Frans Bouma laments the lack of computer science or reference to research papers by agile pundits in various mailing lists (I bet this really applies to nearly all mailing lists, not just the ones he mentions).

After joining Microsoft and drinking from the firehose a bit, I’m happy to report that I am still alive and well and now residing in the Seattle area along with my family. In meeting with various groups, I’ve been very excited by how much various teams here are embracing Test Driven Development (and its close cousin, TAD aka Test After Development). We’ve had great discussions in which we really looked at a design from a TDD perspective and discussed ways to make it more testable. Teams are also starting to really apply TDD in their development process as a team effort, and not just sporadic individuals.

File this in my learn something new every day bucket. I received an email from Steve Maine after he read a blog post in which I discuss the anonymous object as dictionary trick that Eilon came up with.

Six months ago and six days after the birth of my son, Subkismet was also born which I introduced as the cure for comment spam. The point of the project was to be a useful class library containing multiple spam fighting classes that could be easily integrated into a blog platform or any website that allows users to comment.

You’ve been forewarned, this is yet another end-of-year slightly self-inflating retrospective blog post (complete with the cheesy meta-blogging introduction).

Recently, Maxfield Pool from CodeSqueeze sent me an email about a new monthly feature he calls Developer Faceoff in which he pits two developers side-by-side for a showdown.

A common pattern when submitting a form in ASP.NET MVC is to post the form data to an action which performs some operation and then redirects to another action afterwards. The only problem is, the form data is not repopulated automatically after a redirect. Let’s look at remedying that, shall we?

The ASP.NET Routing engine used by ASP.NET MVC plays a very important role. Routes map incoming requests for URLs to a Controller and Action. They also are used to construct an URL to a Controller/Action. In this way, they provide a two-way mapping between URLs and controller actions.