Ben Griswold on February 13th, 2008

Are you involved in your company’s project estimation process? If so, let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that your company has internal constraints which makes estimating rather difficult. For example, let’s say you were required to completed all of your 2008 estimates towards the end of 2007 despite the fact that very few requirements were known. Don’t [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 11th, 2008

I guess it is probably a good idea to avoid the word conservative in your post titles as well.  Unless, of course, you want Google Adsense to start showing political links featuring Bush, McCain (note spelling below), Romney, etc…

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Ben Griswold on February 11th, 2008

If I were to guess, I receive 2.25 bookstore gift cards and 1.25 books around Christmas each year. Nearly 100% of the tangible books have been non-technical in nature.  This year’s book — Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery — was a present from my soon-to-be sister-in-law.  As I don’t tend to read [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 10th, 2008

This announcement may be yesterday’s news for some, but I just discovered Aaron Lerch’s “Kick It” plugin today and it works like a charm.  If you are using WordPress AND Windows Live Writer is your go-to editor AND your posts tend to be .NET related, give Aaron Lerch’s DotNetKicks “Kick It” Counter Plugin for Windows [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 9th, 2008

Whenever I can get away with it, I include basic troubleshooting information in the footer of my web applications.  So it isn’t distracting (or blatantly exposed) to the standard user, the text is hidden.  In other words, I make the font color the same as the background color so the text is only visible when [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 7th, 2008

After tabling the conversation for the past two years, talks of bringing Team Foundation Server (TFS) in-house have started up again. There’s enough new interest that we have had a couple of onsite demos an a group of us traveled up to the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Irvine today for an architectural design session. [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 6th, 2008

You may have noticed the recent attention given to TDD and whether it has been proven effective or not.  I think the entire “conversation” is great.  I appreciate everyone’s position primarily because the parties appear to be presenting their opinions and the interpreted facts with open minds.  If I were to take sides, though, I [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 5th, 2008

I sat through an absolutely fantastic presentation on query optimization a couple of weeks back.  The presenter did a fine job of covering many of the basics like SET NOCOUNT ON, minimize cursor use, avoid explicit or implicit functions in the WHERE clause and why not to use the sp_ prefix when naming custom stored [...]

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