Community developer blogs

Andrew Stopford

Recent Posts

• If only my IDE could do......this

  Posted: yesterday

  I first asked what you most like in your IDE (thanks for your comments, keep them coming), one thing I was after were your thoughts on the following. Code windows in tabs, if your working with a lot of files you end up with a lot of tabs, could that be better? Styling the IDE, you can theme the c

• If only my IDE could do....

  Posted: 02 Dec 2008 at 12:08

  I'm doing some research, what do you want the most from your IDE, what features do you most desire, what do hate the most, what features do you envy the most in other (say Java) IDEs? Let me know your thoughts.

• MbUnit & VS10

  Posted: 23 Nov 2008 at 22:06

  MbUnit 3.0.5 has added support for Visual Studio 10, as before you can now run MbUnit tests direct from the VS test runner. Don't take my word for it though, check out this video from Karen Liu (lead PM on the C# and VB.NET IDEs). If you are playing with the VS10 CTP then you download the MbUnit sup

• A better webforms?

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 13:30

  Last week Phil wrote about the concerns of webform developers that Microsoft was leaving webforms behind in favour of the MVC framework. As Phil writes that is clearly not the case and webforms is enjoying a lot of technology cross over from the MVC framework, which brings me to my post. What I don&

• You are not going to need it

  Posted: 14 Nov 2008 at 22:49

  When you are writing code it is common to think "I may need XYZ" but I am not really going to need it, Agile advocates using the available time as best as possible and if you do not really need it then why waste time? Agile also advocates refactoring to improve and tune your code and these

• .NET 4.0 Contracts

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 22:20

  First showed at the PDC as a part of this Pex session was support for contracts, if you have seen the Spec# project before then you would be on the right lines (same team has worked with the BCL team to deliver his). More details in the Pex session as well as the post from the BCL team.

• VS10 at Tech-Ed Europe

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 23:31

  I just watched some of the keynote at Tec-Ed Europe, here's what I liked. WPF editor - I had wondered about this but the zoom out\in can be useful for large code files, however, I'd like to see some what of marking up sections of code to make it more useful so that by zooming out I can see the

• StyleCop and Resharper

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 23:23

  The StyleCop add-on for Resharper has really gathered steam and Howard has announced a new release. Loads of great features and it really makes the two a killer combination. I do hope that that StyleCop is open-sourced (or open license Microsoft use), the tool is a great tool but it has real pain po

• Co\Contra-Variance in C# 4.0

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 23:11

  Running behind on everything again, picked up a nasty stomach bug that laid me out for a few days (not being able to pick Darcey up was a not nice but making up for it now with hugs-a-plenty). My thanks to Rob for the reminder that my long time wish has been granted and the C# team has added a form

• MbUnit @ PDC08

  Posted: 03 Nov 2008 at 12:45

  The last few weeks for me have been rough with news of a serious illness in my extended family. As such I have missed a great deal of the PDC and other news. Due to this I have also pulled out of the DDD conference next month, my thanks to all that voted for it and hopefully next year I will get my

• Mono @ the PDC

  Posted: 02 Oct 2008 at 09:00 by andrewstopford

  Been wishing for this for the last two PDC's now finally Miguel gets a slot, great news.

• JQuery and Microsoft, some thoughts.

  Posted: 29 Sep 2008 at 22:28 by andrewstopford

  I noted this last night from Scott Hanslemans twitter messages and Scott Gu's blog post, it makes a lot of sense that a popular javascript lib have VS support and be included in the MVC framework. What caught my attention the most however was these parts from Scott Gu's announcement. I'm e

• VSTS Rosario Team Lab

  Posted: 24 Sep 2008 at 23:05 by andrewstopford

  While running through the PDC 08 sessions I spotted this session Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Leveraging Virtualization to Improve Code Quality with Team Lab  Would you like to test fixes in a production-like environment before checking them in to source control? The Visual Studio Team

• VSTS

  Posted: 24 Sep 2008 at 23:04 by andrewstopford

  I've never used VSTS in a commerical enviroment before and I am enjoying my self. Here are a few thoughts. Shelving. Shelving is a lot like private branches in SVN, the ability to park away changes to the main source tree is a nifty feature. I tend to use this when refactoring, for ea

• VibrantInk for tired eyes

  Posted: 17 Sep 2008 at 17:38 by andrewstopford

  I've been using a black color scheme in VS ever since Rob released his VibrantInk scheme. Lately however I've been suffering with tired eyes after hours of looking at the screen and decided that I need to make some changes. Beyond the screen flicker rate I also adjusted the schem

• Caching and SRP pt2

  Posted: 16 Sep 2008 at 17:20 by andrewstopford

  In the comments of the previous example Petar suggested a refactroring to reduce the coupling between object using the cache and the cache it's self, he proposed using generics and it works just fine in the IOC, let's take a look. Starting with the interface .csharpcode { FONT-SIZE: small;

• Caching and the SRP

  Posted: 16 Sep 2008 at 12:38 by andrewstopford

  I've been using Velocity (Microsofts new caching product) on a project and while lurking on the lists spotted a post about testability around the Velocity API's. There may be reasons for doing this but it is something I avoid. I tend to use the SRP principle when it comes to anything that

• CI server wish list

  Posted: 08 Sep 2008 at 21:25 by andrewstopford

  I am interested in hearing folks thoughts on what they like\dislike about the current CI server offerings both commerical and OSS (Java, Ruby or .NET) and what they would love to see in a CI product? To start you off here is a few of mine. One click copy -  copy one build process into a ne

• To fight my fire I need a MOP

  Posted: 08 Sep 2008 at 18:17 by andrewstopford

  I feel like I have reached a peak, I understand and use Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation and Parametric Inheritance (Generics) every day. They solve my computing needs but I very often I can think of better approaches to a problem and wish the compiler and CLI were not without l

• DDD voting opens

  Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 12:52 by andrewstopford

  The voting for DDD opened yesterday, my submission is listed and do give it some thought if you are planning on attending. I've given a MbUnit session here in Manchester first at AgileNorth last year and again last week at the ThoughtWorks geek night, I'd love to bring the session to a wider UK audi