Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

What’s the best book discussing the proper writing of .NET code in general and C# in particular? I’m thinking of something along the lines of Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java, but for C# instead of Java. That is, I want a book that assumes I already know the basic mechanics of the language, and am quite familiar with general object oriented principles like polymorphism, but need to know things such as “classes begin with lower case letters and methods begin with upper case letters.”

Here are a few possibilities:
(more…)

1've decided that as pretty as Gill Sans is, it’s not going to work. On rereading an older post in the new font, 1 noticed a major flaw in its design that makes it unsuitable for production use. 1f you’re reading this post in Gill Sans, you may want to switch your font to see what 1'm talking about. 1f you’re reading it in another font, doubtless you’ve already noticed the problem.

(more…)

I was so taken by the clean look of Mark Pilgrim’s latest blog entry that I just had to look at his stylesheet, and figure out what font he was using. It seems to be Gill Sans at a large size. I’ve now revamped this site to use that as its body font. (Optima is the backup for those deprived PCs without Gill Sans installed.)

On the other hand, he’s using 180% line height which looked a little too big to me, so I’ve set the line height at 140%.

I still need to play with the heading, sidebar, and comment fonts so they match–maybe I should just steal Mark’s choices for these too–but overall this font feels quite a bit more readable and modern to me.

Today I got an e-mail seeking an “XP developer” (in a context where XP obviously stood for Extreme Programming, not Windows XP). What was unusual was that I had to read halfway through the message to find out that they wanted a C#/.NET developer. The first half talked only about XP, Scrum, and Agile techniques.

It’s an interesting inversion of the typical job ad. Normally the programming language is right up top and the methodology is an afterthought, if it’s included at all. Nonetheless, I think these folks got it right. It might well be easier to take a solid Java practitioner of extreme programming and integrate him or her into a .NET XP shop, than it would be to take a .NET person who’d never done XP, and bring them in. On-the-fly training is an oft-forgotten and underrated benefit of both pair programming and test-first development.

Today I’m at the New York PHP Conference. It’s interesting. I wish I had a little more time to spend here this week, but I have to get ready for next week’s ABA conference in Bangor.

I’d hoped to do some live reporting about this, but the wireless here at the Hoel New Yorker is quite flaky. It keeps coming in and out. This is often a problem at some of these old New York hotels that are full of iron in the walls.
(more…)

I’ve enabled the Akismet plugin to try to stop the flood of drug spam that attacks this site. If it works I’ll expand it to The Cafes as well. If you notice a problem and can’t get through via the comments, please send me a personal e-mail and I’ll look into it. Thanks.