This is a decision that often needs to be made by middle management. For managers the most natural way to make this call is by evaluating the return on investment. To calculate the ROI, you need to compare the gain of an investment relative to the amount of investment. And this is exactly where things get hard, if not impossible. Measuring developer productivity is one of the unsolvable problems in our industry. ...
After building arealdeveloper.com, I felt like I had to do a follow-up post sharing my experiences with WebMatrix. While doing some research, I came across this post by Rob Connery. And frankly, I think it’s almost impossible for me to add something to his findings. In a nutshell For those who are here for the “tl;dr”, here are my thoughts on WebMatrix.. WebMatrix is the perfect framework to start with ASP.NET development (wish I had). For people who are already familiar with ASP.NET, WebMatrix will hardly have any learning curve. They should also have a look at it though, because it’s a lot of fun ánd it is a great framework to get things done. Every developer has been asked - at least once - to slap together a site for a distant acquaintance, where the site consists of mostly static pages, with a dynamic List<Something> pulled out of a database. I see WebMatrix as a perfect gluing framework to swiftly ship these types of projects. While you could probably also build something more enterprisey, I don’t think you should. ...
As a technology geek, it should be hard to keep ignoring the latest generation of eReaders (read: the Kindle). With over three million devices sold, the Kindle has proven that it adds value to people’s lives, and that it’s a lot more than just a gadget. Some of the most obvious benefits… You can carry a whole library in your backpack. The price of an eBook often is substantially less than the hardcover version. I am far from a Green, but I can’t neglect the fact that no trees need to be chopped down to print an eBook. Reading a 1000+ page book in bed or next to the pool is the opposite of convenient. ...
Often code reviews are done by one person, the technical lead of your team. In my opinion it’s better to make each developer of your team do code reviews. My arguments Having all developers do code reviews leads to discussions about what coding standards should be used.. Leading to well-documented standards. Each developer is forced to understand the workflow of an application which isn’t his, which expands his domain knowledge. Each developer learns from others and is given an opportunity to teach and discuss why someone chose a certain path.. There is always something new to learn, even for seasoned developers. You might just pick up that latest trick doing whizbang Silverlight 3 stuff from that freshman that just started working this year. Multiple perspectives on a problem can only benefit the solution.
I’ve been thinking about the use of stored procedures lately. Some questions that popped up in my head: What are the advantages/disadvantages? When and how should they be used? Will they extinct with LINQ to SQL becoming more and more popular? Why should you store your queries in your database, instead of in your code.. I asked the opinion of a few ASP.NET/.NET professionals. Hope you find this interesting! Kris Van Der Mast (Blog) Since I’m a consultant I have to go with the specifications of my clients. Most still use stored procedures though I see a shift occurring. My current client allows us to use Linq To Sql for select statements (generated by L2S) but for update, delete and insert statements they require us to make sprocs since they put security on it on a database level. My former client allowed us to use NHibernate (winforms project) but for 3-4 special occasions we used sprocs. ...