Rod Paddock - All Comments

Interesting Finds: May 10, 2008

Jason Haley — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:15:26 GMT

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Chris Eargle — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:08:45 GMT

These are good tips, but the title indicates the topic is antipatterns. Therefore, each section should be presented as such rather than as a tip. "Don't write a book" is not an antipattern, "writing a book" is.

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Kevin S. Goff — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:11:05 GMT

Duffy is just recapping what I already said and wrote ...(he's pretty good at that) :)

Again, great post.

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Jessica Paddock — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:42:22 GMT

You can always write a book about it...How to be a good speaker, for dummies.

Nice blog! You have a very special gift for verbalizing what pisses you off and making it sound so good.

I am amazed you didn't use any choice words that I am so acustomed to.

Love you pre-madonna!

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Jim Duffy — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:19:17 GMT

As usual you've taken out that laser scope, firmly mouted it to the rifle, got the target clearly in the crosshairs and BLAMO! You nailed it DEAD CENTER. Great post!

I know we discuss this type of stuff all the time but you have really brought it all together in a concise and very informative manner.

This is MUST read material...

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Chris Love — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:13:14 GMT

Er um, so you mean, um, that basically, um I should um have my %^&**( together and um basically make the experience a um good one basically.

Good Job man.

re: Public Speaking Anti Patterns

Kevin S. Goff — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:53:02 GMT

Rod, great work. This should be required reading for speakers (and attendees).

I know you well enough to know that you always follow these rules.

Great recommendations from a great speaker....

re: Microsoft Team Systems - Open Source Alternatives

Jerry Coffin — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:05:23 GMT

Hi Rod,

This is really more of a letter to the editor than a comment on your blog entry. I picked up a copy of the Jan/Feb. issue of CoDe magazine at a conference I'm attending. This is the first time I've really read a magazine on coding in quite a while, but I can't say I was overly impressed.

First of all, on your editorial page, you have a typo, citing this site as "blogs.dashpoint.com" instead of "blog.dashpoint.com". Normally a single typo would hardly merit mention, but in this case it affects what appears to be the only way to write a letter to the editor of the magazine.

Anyway, getting to my original reason for writing: the article by Ken Getz titled: "Visual Basic and Respect." The theme of the article is that Ken believes Visual Basic and/or people who use it should be given more respect.

At one point he mentions his claim that: "One gets the respect one demands." This could hardly be more wrong.

Respect must be earned, not demanded. When it is earned, it will be received without demand. When it is not earned, it cannot be received regardless of demand.

From the remainder of the article, I'd guess that Ken already gets more respect than he's earned anyway. His examples are, frankly, execrable. He's taken two (or perhaps three, depending on your viewpoint) separate actions, and conflated them into single wad of spaghetti. His examples deal with:

1) querying a database,

2) filtering the result of that query

3) formatting the results into a particular format

You can argue that querying the database and filtering the results are really a single action -- and I won't argue much -- I'd say they're theoretically separate, but queries include filters so often there's little practical reason to separate the two. There's no room for question, however, that querying the database and formatting the output are two entirely separate actions.

This conflation leads to code that's difficult to read and more difficult to maintain. Obvious problems abound. Consider localizing the code so the tags are in Spanish or French instead of English. You need to be able to read a strange mix of VB, XML and English along with LINQ to XML's own bit of SQL-like querying to be able to get started. Likewise, you need to learn this entire mish-mash to do something simple like adding another field to the output (e.g. email address).

I could go on at much greater length, but the bottom line is as simple as it is obvious: like many other VB users, if Ken wants more respect, he needs to earn it by writing better code.

re: Microsoft Team Systems - Open Source Alternatives

Chris Bilson — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:22:34 GMT

There is a decent thread on [altdotnet] about project management software ("[altnetconf] Feature/bug tracker software?"). Here are a few of the choices listed:

Trac: I have been wanting to try this. I know someone personally that gave it a good review, but it looks like it got mixed reviews in this thread. It sounds like the chief gripe was having to use python to extend it. There is also a site for mods to trac: http://trac-hacks.org/

Mingle: We tried this at work. Liked it. For some reason never got any feedback from management (kind of typical where I work)

...oh...wait...open source...Mingle's not open source.

One tool I want to look at when I have time is Storyverse (code.google.com/.../storyverse).

re: Accessing External Assemblies from SQL Server CLR Stored Procedures

Cyril — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:58:10 GMT

Thanks for this article !

As you said there isn't a lot information about that...

By the way, assemby I want to put on sqlServer is in another project and not a "SQL Server project" but a class library.

To put on server, I share the dll in my SQL Server project (by Visual SourceSafe) and made a pre-build script with sqlcmd. In this, I use SQL "CREATE ASSEMBLY ... FROM" to register it.

re: My First TDD Dividend(s)

cmyers — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:36:59 GMT

Once you get test infected, then the other things, like DI/IoC for example, start making more sense. Admittedly, they're not super useful unless you're religious about testing which is why I think a lot of people don't understand/get irritated by the TDD/Agile/ALT.NET crowd because all these things seem like extra work.

It all starts with TDD, really, and then you start writing code differently in order to make them easier to test.

IMHO, code written to be tested is also code written to be used. It tends to be more open and extensible and easier to change/override/extend.

Some of the best framework/API-type code I've ever written was code that was developed using TDD. It pays off in more than just bug prevention, it pays off in the resultant good, quality design.

Not to mention that TDD code is code that has actually been used by at least one person! Before TDD, much of the code I wrote was YAGNI stuff that didn't get hit for months or years and then suddenly a bunch of bugs were found!

re: My First TDD Dividend(s)

Kevin Miller — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:48:26 GMT

Congrats on your dividends! May they multiply.

Strangely when I am doing TDD I love the little adrenaline surge I get when a test that I expect to pass fails. But I love even more constant endorphin drip I get doing red-green-refactor.

re: Spelunking Silverlight Article Published

Rod Paddock — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:01:47 GMT

Thanks for the find!

re: Spelunking Silverlight Article Published

Annie Nonn — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:36:21 GMT

1 Congratulations

2 Blog title at da top of dee page says Dashpont, not point. Is dat rite?

tank u