Corey Haines started the conference off a bit worried. Are we repeating the mistakes of the '90? Are "learn to code in 24 hour" mentalities populating startups with unprepared developers writing tomorrows legacy code? He suggests reading Learn to Program in 10 Years instead. Businesses are desperate

I have been using psake, the amazing PowerShell based automation tool by James Kovacs, for builds since discovering how awesome they are while working with the Russell Boys. I have a stock set of build scripts that I seem to copy and paste and modify as needed on each new

A closer look at the newer server and client validation features in ASP.NET MVC3. We'll cover validation with DataAnnotations, writing your own custom validation attributes and unobtrusive client-side validation with jquery-validate, remote validation and self validating objects. the presenter Michael Ibarra has been writing software in the

I have subscribed to Derick Bailey's blog for several years. He is one of my favorite Los Techies. I think he has a firm understanding of agile development practices and is one of the many progressive .NET developers to jump ship and start doing Rails development. So I

On Friday, I picked up a copy of Camtasia:Mac by Techsmith. I have been doing screencasts with the Windows version for a year or so now, but I wanted something that would allow me to produce videos captured in both Windows and OSX. I wanted an excuse to produce

Adron Hall posted "My Top 4 Ideal Dev Shop & Product Characteristics, Yours?" to his blog the other day and solicited responses from other developers he knows, including your truly. I wanted to take some time to think about it and put my thoughts in order before responding,

The benefits of pair programming keep presenting themselves to me the more I actively participate in the practice. One of the greatest benefits for me is the opportunity for accelerated learning and teaching. A quick example While working at Russell Investments pairing with Trevor Redfern I was amazed at his

The second ever Coffee && Code will take place at Burial Grounds this Sunday at 1:00PM. Bring your laptop and let's hack on some code. Last time Brad Jennings and I did a ping pong pair programming session completing the String Calculator Kata. So let'

As a professional software developer, I have worked with many folks over the years whose families came from or are still in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Sri Lanka. If you happen to be one and you read my blog please consider becoming a bone marrow

class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var input = "this is a stupid interview question"; var output = new string(new Stack<char>(input).ToArray()); Console.WriteLine(output); Console.ReadKey(); } } Was stuck in my head, so I had to get it out. Zames pointed out in the

Today, Alex and I were pairing on a bug in our system dealing with an editor screen. Some properties of the item being edited are not editable based on the value of other properties of the item. This is implemented in the system fairly easily as a series of "

Bug slayer for great justice. Be sure to watch in HD full screen for maximum awesomeness.

I wrote this today, it made me happy. Somedays, simply writing some code that you are proud of makes it all worth it. public void ImportLiabilityCategoryInput(string[] categories) { ImportCategory(categories, InputDataGroupName.Liability); } public void ImportAssetCategoryInput(string[] categories) { ImportCategory(categories, InputDataGroupName.AssetExisting); } private void ImportCategory(string[] categories, InputDataGroupName group) { WithASourceAndDestination(

If you ever needed a reason to break out of your current programer shell and learn a new language. Check out this quote from Bjarne Stroustrup the creator of C++. Successful software is long-lived; life-spans of decades are not uncommon. A good application/program often outlives the hardware it was

As I leave my amazing team at Russell to take on new challenges with a new team at Milliman, it is good to look back at what I have accomplished here. It is even better to see the appreciation of the value I helped to deliver to Russell. Bobby Johnson

As I leave my amazing team at Russell to take on new challenges with a new team at Milliman, it is good to look back at what I have accomplished here. It is even better to see the appreciation of the value I helped to deliver to Russell. Bobby Johnson

After some internal conversations at work, I tweeted that using ClassMaps with Fluent NHibernate is the the wrong way to approach the problem. This of course was a snarky in the moment tweet as is the title of this post, but I do actually think that auto mapping is the

The Castle Project has been releasing quality OSS components for many years. Most people are familiar with Castle Windsor and how easy it makes dependency management. I have been using the WCF Facility to make hosting and consuming WCF Services just as simple. Let's start with a simple

My team has been moving to using NuGet to solve our dependency problem. Last week we put the final piece in place by publishing our internal shared libraries to an internal NuGet server. This allows us to take advantage of the excellent .NET Open Source community, while keeping our "

I recently ran into an interesting problem. I'll try to describe the problem with out going into specific details of the domain the problem lives in. Let's say I have a list of elements and each element have a property called weight that contains a decimal

I have spent the last few weeks working with a power user in our investment services division. This guy has moved beyond Excel Macros and Access databases to ASP.NET WebForms and SQL Server. From what I can tell, he is completely self taught which is something I can respect.

I recently started playing around with the new jQuery template plugin after seeing Stephen Walther present at my local .NET Users Group. I wanted to share this simple user notification template that I have been using. <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <

I was perusing the TopShelf source code this morning, trying to track down a change in the hosting API, when I discovered that the TopShelf team has succumbed to the new drop the 'I' in interface names meme. It's new to the .NET scene anyway, the

Looks like I have put myself on the hook to speak at the South Sound .NET Users Group again on July 14th 2011. Here is the description up on the site. Bobby Johnson - An Exploration of Dynamic and Metaprogramming with C# 4 With the introduction of the Dynamic Language

I found some time yesterday to finally play around a bit with some tech that I have been tracking recently; AppHarbor, NancyFx, Highcharts & this spiffy CSV feed on Yahoo Finance. It took a while to figure out how to set up Nancy. I think the documentation is a bit