Efficiency Upgrade
Developers solve problems. Good developers solve problems efficiently. The reward for that efficiency is [insert your preferred reward here]. Let’s assume you’re simply motivated by the satisfaction of a job well done (or maybe a promotion, a raise, longer lunch breaks, or just some extra time with your family). Whatever the motivation, the secret to solving problems efficiently is not inventing everything from scratch. Certainly the secret is not spinning your mental wheels hoping for inspiration. And most definitely the secret is not using Intellisense to arbitrarily try classes, methods, and properties until something works.
The secret to solving development problems efficiently is having the right information and the means to find the information you don’t have.
Getting Started with Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a development practice that can help improve your company’s ability to deliver quality software. It can reduce the time to market and the deployment cycle from functional complete products to having the solutions deployed on desktop or servers.
Continuous Integration, or CI, can start with a lone developer desktop and mature closer towards production. The ultimate goal is to have a CI environment that can take you from checked-in code to production ready installation packages.
The instructions in this article will help you get started with CI even if you’re a single developer or a small team.
This is a process that takes time, but don’t be afraid of the road ahead, I will walk you through the first baby-steps towards a well-tuned machine. CI-practice is one of many important elements for the software development industry to mature to levels of other types of manufacturing.
C# Features You Should Be Using
by Ted Neward
When Microsoft first introduced C# to the masses in 2000, it was, in many respects, a language that anyone who’d ever worked with Java or C++ could pick up, learn, and be a productive developer after only a few hours of study. Granted, there were a few subtleties that took a bit of getting used to, like events, but on the whole, the C# language emerged as a pretty close descendant of its predecessors.
But as C# developed, first in the 2.0 release and then in the 3.0 release, the language took a sharp turn from its ancestral legacy into some strange territory by comparison — first with enumerators in 2.0, then lambda expressions in 3.0 — and a number of .NET developers found themselves longing for "the good old days" of C#, worrying that the language was too complicated and painful to use now. Granted, the LINQ features of C# were widely and warmly received, but some of the underlying features that made LINQ possible were barely understood, and to this day, rarely used outside of LINQ.
It’s time to put that trend where it belongs — out to pasture. Let’s take a look at the top 6 features of C# that you should be using if you’re not already. And while we’re at it, let’s see if we can spare your fingers some trauma, by reducing the number of keystrokes required to get something done.
Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets
by Brian Noyes
One of the most underutilized productivity features in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 is Code Snippets. Even though most developers have heard about them, I find when working with consulting customers that there are few developers who use them on a regular basis. Even if they do use them, they vastly underutilize them by only using a couple of them and never create their own. In this article, I give you a quick intro into what code snippets are, how they work, what is available out of the box, and how to go beyond that by quickly creating your own code snippets.
Code Snippets Overview
Code snippets were introduced in Visual Studio 2005 and allow you to emit a chunk of code into your editor by typing a few keystrokes (a shortcut mnemonic). I’m going to use C# for the examples in this article, but just realize that code snippets work in Visual Basic and other .NET languages as well. That chunk of code can just be a static chunk of code, but what really makes code snippets powerful is that they can have placeholders that you can quickly overtype when you invoke the code snippet.