Writing
Articles
Essays on thinking clearly, working for yourself, and doing real work while AI rewrites the rules. Two decades of them.
Is Premature Optimization Really Evil?
A real story about an order system that broke under a sales spike, used to argue premature optimization is only evil when you optimize the wrong thing.
2008.07.24Read →Mobilizing Your/My Blog – mobile.blog.donnfelker.com
How I used Mofuse to mobile-enable my blog and pointed a custom subdomain at it with a simple CNAME record, no code required at all.
2008.07.17Read →Passed the ASP.NET 3.5 Exam
I passed the ASP.NET 3.5 beta exam at Tech-Ed 2008, which makes me a certified MCTS in both ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 now. Woohoo!
2008.07.17Read →Calgary ALT.NET Open Space – August 15-17
Details on the Calgary ALT.NET Open Space, an unconference covering TDD, BDD, DDD, Agile, and Lean, with sessions set by whoever shows up.
2008.07.14Read →Tree Surgeon 2.0 Released
Tree Surgeon 2.0 is out: support for VS 2003/2005/2008, a choice of NUnit or MbUnit, and updated NAnt scripts for .NET 1.1 through 3.5.
2008.07.14Read →Virtual Earth – End of Life
Microsoft is retiring Virtual Earth versions 3, 4, and 5 in the coming months. Here's what it means, and why my MapPoint geocoding class is unaffected.
2008.07.02Read →Recommended Reading
A running list of the software and IT books I actually recommend, from Fowler's enterprise patterns to Hunt's Pragmatic Programmer.
2008.06.21Read →GMail = Dog Slow
Gmail crawling because of all its AJAX and JavaScript? Switch to the Older Version or Standard HTML view for a noticeably faster inbox.
2008.06.13Read →I Took The ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exam, and then the red pill
I took the ASP.NET 3.5 beta exam with almost no prep -- 70 tough questions covering WCF, AJAX, and mobile, plus tips on surviving Microsoft's exam tricks.
2008.06.10Read →Resources from Desert Code Camp
Slides, source code, and a fix for a Unity DynamicMethod bug from my Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control talk at Desert Code Camp.
2008.06.03Read →Intro to Microsoft Unity – Dependency Injection Container
A hands-on intro to Microsoft's Unity dependency injection container, covering manual and XML-based type registration with a downloadable sample app.
2008.05.26Read →TIP: Utilizing Fluent Syntax with the "Is" Keyword in Rhino Mocks and NUnit
Rhino Mocks and NUnit both use an Is keyword, which collides. Use NUnit's Iz syntax helper instead so both fluent APIs work together.
2008.05.23Read →