This morning I woke up with visions of sugar code dancing in my head. It is a coding day and I was ready to sling it, only to be bowled over in stomach pain. Not sure what it was, but it was very unpleasant and wasn’t accompanied by any other symptoms like gas or otherwise.

These days I tend to find the holidays more a burden than something to look forward to. However with my family visiting us this year, I am quite excited. Maybe I’ll put up some lights like this display. The screenshot doesn’t do the video justice. It has to be seen.

One common objection I hear to TDD and writing unit tests is that it creates a lot of extra work to develop software. And this is true, but it does not give a complete picture. TDD and writing and maintaining unit tests do take discipline and do increase the time (thus cost) of writing code. No doubt about it. However, this cost reflects the true cost of writing quality code and lowers the total cost of developing and maintaining software.

Wesner writes that a couple of readers criticized him for his desire to aspire for greatness. Well obviously Wesner, you should aspire for mediocrity! In any case, one reader comments,

In his post Unit tests are the new documentation Scott sees unit tests as an undue burden much like documentation. Documentation, typically written after the fact, inevitably falls sway to the laws of entropy and becomes hopelessly outdated.

Sam Gentile is preaching and I am in the choir. I’ve talked about the benefits of unit testing and refactoring in the past, but Sam makes this great point.

I haven’t confirmed this myself, but I believe Scott when he says that the latest version of RSS Bandit changed some of the keyboard settings. In particular he states that to mark a post as read changed from CTRL+M to CTRL+Q.

In case you were wondering, this is where my wife and I will be spending our New Years Eve this year. Some of the highlights of the expansive line-up include John Digweed, Christopher Lawrence, The Crystal Method, Miguel Migs, Muytaytor and Black Eyed Peas (though they seem a bit out of place, they are a hot ticket).

Apparently I am quite sensitive to jet lag. My wife has been cheerful, upbeat, and energetic, while I’ve come very close to biting the heads of little babies and throwing my own feces on the wall. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Upon returning from any vacation, I usually have a great desire to upload all my pics to Flickr and give each one a detailed, witty, interesting description. About five pictures into the process, I grow fatigued and give up on the whole process. So what if the picture is named DC32101?

Alright. Enough about vacations, it’s time to get back to work, so let’s dig our teeth into the dispose pattern again. In a recent post, I wrote up a potential error I saw in the Framework Design Guidelines.

This post about crosswalk countdowns and icons reminds me of the crosswalk icon in Bilbao.

Well my wife and I arrived back from Spain tonight after a grueling series of flights. Is it just me or has this heightened security environment we live in today given airport staff a crutch to be completely rude and uncommitted to decent service? Is it not possible for security and service to go together hand in hand? It is certainly something we strive for as software developers.

Welcome!

The missus and I are pretty much packed and ready to go. We have to be at the airport at 5 AM. Yes, that is AM as in early morning (or late at night depending how you look at it).

The Framework Design Guidelines has an illuminating discussion on the Dispose pattern for implementing IDisposable in chapter 9 section 3. However, there was one place where I found a potential problem.

As soon as I saw the code sample on K. Scott Allen’s latest blog post, I knew he was talking about the Membership Provider.

One complaint that I’ve had about DotNetNuke (DNN for short) is the difficulty I’ve had in creating skins that match client design comps exactly to the pixel. And believe me, they check every single one.

If you zoom real closely, you can see me waving at the satellite.