Issue: 2008 - May/June

Rod Paddock argues that growth as a software developer is inseparable from active participation in a community. Through his own arc—from Boy Scouts and high school gaming to online forums, user groups, conference speaks, and editorial work at CODE Magazine—he shows how mentorship, collaboration, and sharing knowledge build skills and confidence. Personal stories of teaching, presenting, and forging lasting connections illustrate the rewards of contributing and helping ot...hers. He ends with a call to action: engage in user groups, Code Camps, Open Space events, blogs, and writing to strengthen and sustain the community.See More

Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo argues that individuals seeking to adopt agile development must first unlearn entrenched bad habits with humility and embrace just-in-time learning, then incrementally and iteratively blend new techniques into existing practice. He offers a pragmatic, stepwise approach—from reading The Pragmatic Programmer and securing source control to implementing continuous integration, automated testing, refactoring, and design-pattern knowledge—culminating in in...terface-based programming and test-driven development, supported by lifelong learning. The goal is sustainable skill growth and genuine practitioner mastery, not a rushed, brittle transition.See More

SharePoint is a very powerful platform. It gives you a very easy-to-setup place to put your data in.And you know what happens when you have a tool like SharePoint? People use it! And then when people have been putting in data, they want to retrieve it, in all sorts of weird ways. Putting in data is only half the story, and I’d argue the easier part. It is fetching the data in a meaningful and targeted manner that separates the wheat from chaff.

Everything right or wrong with a software project is management’s fault.Either management staffed the right people or the wrong people. Management was absent or involved. Management is hard, and there are numerous factors that can cause success or failure of a project. In the best situation you have great people who do great work. A software manager can even succeed despite themselves if they happen to staff a top-notch team even though the managers, themselves, might no...t be very competent. The success that a top-notch team achieves is still the manager’s fault. Failure, however, is harder to blame on the team because a manager must be able to solve problems as they come along. This article will focus on tips and knowledge to use when managing an agile software project.See More

Scrum is an agile software development process to manage software projects. Scrum is based on three simple principles: visible progress, constant inspection, and adaptation. With Scrum, teams use an empirical approach to adapt to changing requirements and priorities. Teams using Scrum focus on delivering working software to their customers on a frequent basis.

Extreme Programming and Scrum compliment each other, but they weren’t made from the start to fit together hand in glove.Practicing Extreme Programming and Scrum are more effective when practiced together, and even more effective when practiced together as Behavior-Driven Development.

Are you moving a Windows desktop application to the browser, and sweating bullets, or perhaps just not quite sure about how all the new Web and data tools work together?With each passing year, Microsoft offers newer and more powerful tools for building rich database applications on the Web. So many and so frequently, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with the new tools and still meet the requirements of your job! This article will show you how to get the most out o...f the new features in ASP.NET 3.5. The article will also show how you can use features in LINQ, even if you only use stored procedures for data access. And finally, since most applications use reporting, I’ll throw in a few nuggets on using SQL Server Reporting Services.See More

So you wanna be agile, do you?You want to work in small increments and continuously deliver business functionality. You want to embrace change, even if that means taking on new requirements late in the game. But wait, won’t that be dangerous? It doesn’t have to be if you’ve got a solid Continuous Integration infrastructure in place.

Part 1 of this article dealt with the idea of moveable/resizable graphics.I wrote about contour presentation and explained the design of common and special types of contours, which allow you to apply them to the widest variety of objects. I used simple examples to illustrate the technique of involving these objects in moving/resizing. In part 2, I describe complicated cases of moveable/resizable graphics, e.g., engineering plotting, as well as objects involved in both fo...rward moving and rotation. I also explain how you can apply the same technique to controls and how you can base customization of the forms on moveable/resizable objects.See More

May/June 2008 .NET Rocks! column

In this Ask the Doc Detective column, Doc Detective answers reader questions about Visual Studio 2008 documentation and features—clarifying that "LINQ to DataSets" queries DataTables not DataSets, explaining why VBA edits are overwritten during VSTO debugging and how to preserve them, pointing to the new DataRepeater in Visual Basic Power Packs for repeating layouts, noting single-instance limits in multi-user Terminal Services, and recommending MSDN's community tagging for discoverability.

Ken Getz recounts puzzling moments when software appears to "fall apart," arguing that apparent breakdowns often stem from human assumptions, not bits disappearing. Using a Visual Studio/DataGridView example, he shows that binding a string array yields string.Length values and explains the correct fix—project into an anonymous type with a Name property and call ToList()—then frames these surprises as everyday entropy and the limits of memory.