Here’s a quick fact that would have saved me quite some time of frustration and fruitless googling had I known it: When debugging Windows Phone applications in Visual Studio 2010, user-unhandled exceptions will always break into the debugger, regardless of how much you fiddle with Debug | Exceptions or Tools | Options | Debugging: Windows [...]

A quick tip in case you’re a Ruby person and haven’t used the Sprockets gem: Sprockets is a Rack application that serves assets (javascript, css, images etc) over HTTP. It’s built in to Rails 3.1 and DHH spent a significant portion of the RailsConf 2011 keynote promoting its benefits (although I’m not sure he ever mentioned its [...]

I bet you and your great idea are having a fantastic time in Thoughtland. You’ve probably invited some of your friends too, and you’re all tall as trees from the Group Think hookah. No idea what I’m talking about? You have to watch Patrick Copeland’s QCon Keynote video on Pretotyping. Those 43 minutes might just save [...]

What happens when you give three small teams ninety minutes, one loosely worded spec and no rules? Read on. We developers instinctively focus on the code. It must be testable, decoupled, beautiful, robust, and (here’s the thing) it should hopefully do what it supposed to do. Let’s create a situation where, for once, only the [...]

Daniel Vaughan realized that synchronous web service calls are perfectly legal in Silverlight as long as the calls are not made on the UI thread. He wrote a neat library on CodeProject for it. Using Daniel’s library, our Async helper and interfaces for our web services, we can write beautiful web service-calling code in Silverlight: [...]

Executing code asynchronously in C# gives you at least two headaches: the code becomes hard to read and a pain to unit test. Here’s one way to alleviate these pains, using a configurable singleton aptly named “Async”: Async.Execute(() => { // … Console.WriteLine(“We’re running this on a background thread”); // … etc }); That’s the [...]