Author Archive

Simple little things. The 42 extension method anti-pattern

By shoogend at 2 September, 2010, 4:49 pm

Extension methods are a powerful feature in .NET, and have been increasingly adopted by the developer community. Also, LINQ and other framework features rely heavily on extension methods. In fact, extension methods were originally invented to be able to implement LINQ without having to change a lot of .NET framework base classes. Basically, an extension [...]

Simple little things. Placing dynamic images in databound controls

By shoogend at 31 August, 2010, 3:38 pm

Sometimes there’s these really little things that hardly seem worth the effect blogging about. But when you start googling for the apparent solution, there’s a million-and-one blogs, forum questions that at the least are contradicting. In this particular case I wanted to set different images in different rows in a Repeater or GridView depending on [...]

Sander’s talk at TechEd US 2010. How frameworks can kill your projects and patterns to prevent getting killed

By shoogend at 20 June, 2010, 12:48 pm

Last week, the Microsoft TechEd North America 2010 took place in the great city of New Orleans. I was lucky to be invited to do a talk on how frameworks can kill your projects. When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks enter the market. Both from Microsoft and from open source. [...]

Horrible web design (I) – HP Help Form

By shoogend at 17 June, 2010, 10:49 pm

Every now and then you see really horrible examples of software development. While I was try to scan a document using my printer/scanner, the software by HP failed miserable. Being the nice customer I am, when HP invited me to fill in an enquiry about the quality of their service. The form presented to fill [...]

PowerPoint Architecture

By shoogend at 8 June, 2010, 6:00 pm

It’s a mildly sunny April morning in 2002 when I park my car outside of a huge government agency office in a small suburban city near Utrecht. I am invited for a brainstorm session with the agency’s enterprise architects. Although I do not consider myself an enterprise architect, and explained that upfront, they were eager [...]

Death by landscape

By shoogend at 25 May, 2010, 9:35 pm

Suppose you are in the IT department of a (very) large organization and have been developing systems for your organization for quite some years. Chances are that you will have a landscape of systems great and small that all serve a particular purpose, or that have served a particular purpose. Systems that were built in [...]

Extension methods (with DevDays 2010 slides)

By shoogend at 15 April, 2010, 11:11 am

This post was originally published in .NET Magazine. I re-posted it because of the talk I did at Microsoft’s DevDays 2010 in Den Haag recently. The slides for this talk can be downloaded here. As you’re probably have been made aware of in abundance, in .Net 3.5 Microsoft introduced a little language feature called LINQ. [...]

Alzheimer Architecture

By shoogend at 14 April, 2010, 12:48 am

Let’s suppose for a moment that it’ is 1986. And let’s suppose you are starting a new company. A company that sells products or services to customers, as most companies do. Let’s say you selling (surf) board wear. You start selling your first t-shirts and you decide that you need to automate stuff. So you [...]

The big question. Managing IT projects Barack Obama style

By shoogend at 19 March, 2010, 12:11 pm

Despite misunderstanding and resistance of his space-flight loving people president Barack Obama recently aborted the Constellation space program. The Constellation program targets at putting humans on the moon again, for the first time since 1972, with the ultimate goal of possibly planning a manned trip to Mars in 2025. Although I had never heard of [...]

Spring 2010 speaking engagements

By shoogend at 15 March, 2010, 12:44 am

Again doing a lot of talks this spring on a wide range of subjects, from new technology, via enterprise agile to model driven development, but also about smart use cases, domain driven design, UML, and software architectures, design patterns, frameworks and .NET. This season’s highlights? Not a difficult choice: doing talks both at Microsoft DevDays [...]