From time to time, even in this enlightened age of software development, I run into developers that don’t use version control for their software projects. I don’t understand why. The state of software development isn’t like it was a decade ago where CVS was the only free option and all of the commercial systems cost a lot of money. I even remember when people had to pay for Visual SourceSafe just to endure the pain. But in the modern era, there are a lot of choices that are very economical, and the commercial systems aren’t that bad either. More...

Since learning about Source Server and how it works with debuggers such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio or WinDBG from the Debugging Tools for Windows, I’ve become an avid fan of adding version control information to my debug and release-mode PDB symbol files. I’ve learned the value of having this information in my symbol files for debugging programs that I’ve released to users that they have had problems with. Also, having them for debugging minidumps has become an invaluable tool that I simply cannot live without. More...

Desert Code Camp is coming up on Saturday June 13th. I’m pretty excited about this one because I’m going to present for the first time. I’m actually diving in deep because there are quite a few subjects that I want to speak about. The four sessions that I have proposed are below. More...

About a week ago, I started taking a look at a new version control system (at least it’s new to me). The version control system is called Git, and it’s one of a new generation of distributed version control systems that are being targeted towards geographically distributed teams. Git is gaining significant ground in the open source world as it was originated by the Linux kernel team to coordinate their development of the Linux kernel. But I’m seeing it pop up on more things such as FitNesse. More...

I’ve done a few WPF projects now and have gained some good experiences with using ClickOnce as a deployment technology. ClickOnce works very well when you’re packaging and deploying through Visual Studio, but it gets very counterintuitive when trying to produce real software products. My main problem with it is that Visual Studio only builds. It’s good at building. You write code and build it. However, real software products that might be built with Visual Studio, are packaged. Packaged applications have help files and other files. Plus, modern applications are modular, meaning that modules are not necessarily statically linked with a product and need to be added to the software package during the build process. So ClickOnce/Visual Studio tend to fail when dealing with packaging software products, which is what I try to do.

To get around this problem, I took a deep look into how Visual Studio published ClickOnce applications, and stole some code from another Microsoft tool that will allow me to package software products using MSBuild and support ClickOnce delivery of my software products as well, all while only requiring a since custom MSBuild task. More...

About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out. More...

In my last post, I discussed what my production environment looks like for ImaginaryRealities.com. In this post, I'll discuss my development environment that I'm using to build the ImaginaryRealities.com web site. I won't focus so much on the hardware than on the software and tools that I'm using to build the web site. More...

Microsoft released version 4.3 of their StyleCop utility. StyleCop is an add in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that will parse and analyze the source code for a project. StyleCop can be used to ensure that code matches coding standards adopted by a software development company or team. It's an excellent tool that helps to ensure the overall quality of a product. StyleCop is similar to FxCop, except that it examines the source code instead of a compiled assembly.

I'll be honest, my artistic abilities kind of max out once I get to doodles and stick figures. Sure, I can draw 3D cubes better than anyone that I know, or nice UML diagrams on a white board, but I've always struggled from a user experience perspective when it comes to building web or Windows user interfaces.

One of the biggest frustrations that I've always had is color selection. I've always been horrible at it, but mostly because standard computer science curriculum and most textbooks on developing software spend very little time on color theory or selection.

It's not until recently, when I've been dedicating more time to understanding using CSS for designing web pages, that I've come to better understand color theory. There are many great CSS books out there right now that spend a decent amount of time discussing color selection. Through one of these books, I came across the Color Scheme Generator web application.

This is a great little web application. You can use the color wheel to pick out your base hue. If none of the base colors suit your need, and you have the RGB value for another color that you'd like to use, you can enter the RGB value and generate a custom color scheme. From the chosen base hue, the Color Scheme Generator will generate a palette of usable colors in either a monotone, contrast (using the complementary hue), triad (3 colors), tetrad (4 colors), or analogic color scheme. In addition, the Color Scheme Generator will let you adjust the size of the angles for the triad, tetrad, and analogic color schemes to vary the colors even more. Once the color scheme has been chosen, you can also alter the chosen colors more by choosing pastel, dark pastel, light pastel, contrast, or pale colors.

This is a great utility for selecting colors to use in a document or to use as the basis of a user experience for either a web or Windows application. Definitely add this tool to your toolbox.

I like ASP.NET and building web sites and web applications in ASP.NET. I haven't liked SharePoint development. I'll be honest, SharePoint intimidates me. I haven't made enough time to sit down and understand CAML or creating custom site definitions. I like things that I can upgrade and I think that SharePoint is difficult on that point. I like developing on client operating systems to experience what the end-user experiences, and installing and developing on a Windows Server OS just hasn't felt right. I don't like having to switch environments to get me email and do all of my other activities.

I dislike developing for SharePoint, but I've never said that I never will develop for SharePoint, and now I'm starting to reach a point where I really need to consider it. Let me explain to you why... More...