First: Principles

• DevExpress Appointment Template Exception: The file 'MyControl.ascx.cs' does not exist.

  The DevExpress ASPxScheduler control is a nice calendar control. It seems to take a fair amount of code and study to get all the bits of code together you need to use it, but once it's together it presents a really nice interface to the user.
  
  The control [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: May 14, 2008, 6:59pm EDT
  

• Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg

  For a while, Scott Rosenberg at Wordyard would send a free copy of his book to anyone who was willing to review it. Thanks, Scott! Here's mine:
  
  I look at this book and remember the many times I was in the same situation as the Chandler folks [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: April 16, 2008, 11:10pm EDT
  

• Blog anniversary!

  Four years ago I took the plunge and started blogging. And today...well, I probably have just about the same number of readers as I did then :) But I've done some posts I've liked along the way. These days I'm a lot more likely to Twitter any thoughts I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 27, 2008, 8:30pm EST
  

• Startup secrecy

  SHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Please NO talking about the company to anyone. No blogging, talking, posting, emailing about the company’s particulars, etc…
  
  
  A note I got today warning us of the terrific need for secrecy around the company that was created at the Bloomington Startup Weekend this past weekend. I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 12, 2008, 8:36pm EST
  

• Bloomington Startup Weekend

  Wow, looks like the Bloomington Startup Weekend is proceeding apace. It was announced today as an official part of the Startup Weekends that have been going on around the country - there was one in West Lafayette, wonder if their company made boilers - after a voting process [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: January 16, 2008, 9:40pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• A Facebook feed for the open web

  I really don't care that much for Facebook. I don't watch enough movies to take the little quizzes, and I'm not really all that interested in throwing a vampire at my friends, or whatever those weird little applications are supposed to be. I hear that some people use it [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 06, 2007, 10:28pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Pair Programming vs. Code Reviews

  Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror is asking for comments on the relative efficiency of these processes. We do both at my company, and while I don't think I have anything truly original to add, I come down on the agile side of the discussion (which should not be [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 19, 2007, 9:59am EST
  by Ben Fulton

• iFrame scroll to anchor problem

  So on my basketball fan page, HoosierBall, I was working on the schedule display. I had originally set up a simple widget from Zvents, but after using that for two years Zvents apparently changed their entire business model, from events created by users to events created by businesses. Every [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 11, 2007, 11:05pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Some test code smells

  More of my writeup on the XUnit session I went to nearly two months ago. I hope someday to make all of my note-taking blog entries coherent to a larger audience :)
  
  There are a couple of competing dynamics you get when writing tests: the first is that, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 08, 2007, 10:22pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Request could not be submitted for background processing

  Boy, don't you hate it when the request could not be submitted for background processing? I know I do.
  
  This is a rather inexplicable error message that Crystal Reports pops up. If you search for the message, you see a few ideas for solutions, but what I eventually did [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 07, 2007, 9:40pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Michael Gartenberg - Still Not Twittering

  Michael Gartenberg is still not twittering, poor unenlightened soul. He prefers to use Facebook for his minute-to-minute status, and doesn't want to add another bunch of contacts to another social network after having done it twice with Facebook and LinkedIn. Sure can't blame him for that. To mix a [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 17, 2007, 9:28pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Bloomington Geek Dinner

  I copied the link up there from the Facebook event page...I have no idea what it will tell you if you're not a member, or even if the link is good for anyone besides me! Anyway, we're hosting a Bloomington Geek Dinner next Tuesday. Geek dinners got to be popular [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 16, 2007, 8:34pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Indy Tech Fest

  Big room has no wifi; smaller room seems to work pretty well. I feel very blind without a net connection. Have I said that before? :)

  Session #1:
  Stephen Fulcher, VS 2008
  3.0 install only has WCF and WPF, everything else is the same as 2.0
  Integration is tight to SQL [...]

  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 13, 2007, 2:41pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Continuous Integration

  The time between a defect being entered and being found is related to the expense of fixing it
  
  Graphing the number of tests over time would seem to be a good idea
  
  Sligo dashboard: classes, LOC, duplication, max complexity, tests run, line coverage, branch coverage, FindBugs violations; PMD [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 21, 2007, 8:53am EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• How to work with an open source team

  "Free as in Freedom"
  "Free as in Beer"
  
  [opensource.org]
  
  Q: Don't people resent when companies take open source projects and make money off of them? A: More power to them! Many companies are using their employees to do open source. It's good PR for a company to [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 20, 2007, 1:48pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• How to Gather Customer Feedback

  Don't aggravate customers with annoying surveys!
  Make sure to ask "Is there anything else?"
  
  Several stories about bad feedback forms
  
  Interviewing 5-10 customers is probably as good as interviewing hundreds
  
  Don't assume that no complaints = customer satisfaction. They may just be putting up with it, especially [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 20, 2007, 8:31am EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Security code reviews

  Foundstone Security Frame
  Hacme Casino [www.foundstone.com]
  Foundstone CodeScout
  
  Paros (web app security assessment) [www.parosproxy.org]
  
  Don't overanalyze. (Spending two hours determining if a strcpy is vulnerable. Takes two minutes to change)
  
  Identify code review objectives (Insider backdoors, compliance with specific regulations)
  
  Lots of discussion of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 19, 2007, 3:47pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Usability by Inspection

  Doing code reviews? That's good! Code reviews are a big help. They ensure uniformity of code, teach people new design patterns, and often even help to avoid bugs.
  
  Doing usability reviews?
  
  Me either. But if you've got a product that has a UI, an easy thing to do [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 19, 2007, 1:48pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Web Application Risk Modeling

  "Reverse" model - take the business case of the system and work down to threats.
  
  A threat is not a vulnerability. A threat is what someone might try to do to your system; a vulnerability is how they would do it successfully
  
  What risk drivers are there?
  
  [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 19, 2007, 8:20am EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• xUnit Test Patterns and Smells

  This comes from a really good session by Gerard Meszaros on Test Patterns at SD Best Practices 2007.
  
  Here's my history on test-driven develoment: Back in the nineties, I first read Martin Fowler's Refactoring. I thought it was a good idea, and attempted several refactorings on the code [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 18, 2007, 1:40pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Software in the large

  Here are my initial notes on the Jutta Eckstein presentation on scaling agile development across large teams. Cleanup may follow :)
  
  Scrum of Scrums
  Crystal
  
  Iteration Duration: larger the team, shorter the development cycle
  per week, count on a half day of retrospective (two week cycle = 1 [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 18, 2007, 9:16am EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Could not load type 'Global'

  The comments on Harish's blog entry from two years ago give a lot of different solutions to the 'Could not load type "Global" ' problem that you sometimes get in ASP.Net. My solution to the issue was an interesting twist on one of those answers.
  
  I had recently [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 10, 2007, 10:06pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Pair Programming with VNC

  Dietrich Kappe writes on the Agile Ajax blog on surmounting the difficulties of pair programming when part of your team is offshore. Interesting stuff, but Dietrich, you also made the offhand comment that Test Driven Development is one of your commandments as well. What's your process for writing [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 06, 2007, 8:58pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• School Daze

  Wow, Amy Makice is stressing me out with her story of a second-grader stressed out in the first two weeks of class. I'm looking forward to hearing the resolution as I don't doubt I have similar experiences ahead - and of course, there are also the ramifications of putting [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 27, 2007, 7:34pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Deconstructing the Wiki Decision

  Educator Christian Long writes on using Wikis in the classroom. I'm not an educator, and my kid isn't one of Mr. Long's students, but I sure would like to see similar tools used in my kid's school. I'm not sure how particularly useful they would be in kindergarten, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 21, 2007, 12:23pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Bloomington not yet a'Twitter

  Lots of interesting stuff going on in the Bloomington scene this week. James Boyd, who I've written about before, sat down to watch and interpret the 36 hours in three days of Monroe County budget hearings, and posted them on a dedicated comment thread on the newspaper's web site...I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 15, 2007, 7:46pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Dare Obasanjo on Open Social Networks

  Dare writes on Open Social Networks. One thing he doesn't bring up, though, is the existence of specialized social networks and how they fit into the whole. He uses Flickr and YouTube as examples of sites that have good API's for getting and setting data, but part [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 06, 2007, 9:24pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Your code is suboptimal!

  
  Check out Eric Sink's blog for a nice, and almost free, T-shirt. Eric runs SourceGear, a version control company, which I'm sure is very nice software, but I've never used it. But the T-Shirt is good quality, and the package comes with a [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 04, 2007, 8:12pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom

  Boy, doesn't this stink? (Thanks, Vorlath). As a rule, I don't like commenting on outrageous stuff; yes, it's outrageous, yes, those darned company/government/media droids, there oughta be a law. Or a law repealed, or something. What makes this one a bit different is that there oughta be protests. [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 03, 2007, 10:32pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Javadoc Clutter

  Ed Gibbs, one of my favorite bloggers, writes on the usefulness of javadoc comments. (I meant to write on Alfred Thompson's thoughts on the issue last month as well, but didn't get to it.) Here's my take: If you're coding properly, you have lots of little methods, as [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 25, 2007, 8:40pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• The 20 Dumbest Words in Software Development

  Brandon McMillon writes on doing it right. (Thanks to Alfred Thompson for the link.) He doesn't touch on the agile side of software development - although I can guess his opinion by his planned article "Pair Programming is for Morons" - and so the article has a lot [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 23, 2007, 5:56pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Should Newspapers Become Local Blog Networks?

  Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 writes about newspapers jacking up their blog count. I think the thing that most people are missing when it comes to whether newspapers should be more like blogs, or should bloggers be more like reporters, is that we, as blog readers, are really, really [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 21, 2007, 2:55pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Learning from Joel Spolsky (and Dave Winer)

  Here are my comments on Joel's comments on Dave Winer's comments concerning comments. I think Dave is dead-on, but the whole issue is really more of an A-List issue than it is a general concern. I bet there's some sort of law that states that the amount of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 20, 2007, 6:48pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer

  Seth Godin suggests that an up-and-coming job description will be Online Community Organizer; that would be someone who can gather together everyone in an industry and make them feel like they have to be part of the conversation in this forum. I could see it coming someday, but my [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 19, 2007, 5:45pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Marc Andreessen's Eleven lessons

  Marc's disabled comments on his (excellent) blog. Marc, I see at least two issues with that: First, a lot of times I only have a sentence or two to add to a post and it hardly seems worthwhile to create a brand new article on my own blog. Second, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 10, 2007, 8:13pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Evaluating Javascript in an NUnit test

  Adam Esterline posted his solution to javascript testing. He uses WatiN to run tests, which I wasn't excited about; I was hoping for a way to test where I didn't have to install any more software anywhere. Here's the solution I came up with:
  
  

  
  static object [...]	

  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: July 05, 2007, 7:17pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Lawn sign in the Forbidden City

  Mark Hurst's great This Is Broken website gives examples of bad user interfaces, both on the net and in the meat world. You can't argue with most of the entries, but I love this sign. The grass is quietly asking us, "Please Do Not Disturb Me". The extra [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: June 07, 2007, 7:24pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Frames Per Second in birds

  I had occasion to visit Hardin Ridge yesterday for the International Migratory Bird Day celebrations. They had several stations, and it was fun for the kids, but one thing I thought was interesting was during a presentation on birds of prey. They displayed a peregrine falcon and talked about its [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: May 20, 2007, 6:52pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Choosing a Kindergarten

  It's a funny thing, but I'm pretty used to being marketed to. When I needed to get a gym membership, the gyms that I went to had someone there to give me a tour; show off the machines and the hot tub; in general make me excited about going there. [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: May 11, 2007, 7:39pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Precociousness

  Hey, dad?
  Uh-huh?
  How many hours are there in a day?
  There are 24 hours in a day, son.
  Oh.
  So how many hours are there in a night?
  I meant, there are 24 hours in a day and night together.
  Even in wintertime?
  Huh?
  In wintertime the nights are [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: April 30, 2007, 8:13pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• FastTrack seminar, part 2

  Second session at the seminar was on the new features of SQL Server 2005; since I was at the launch party in Indianapolis I didn't feel like there was a whole lot that was really new; but since I'm currently employed at an Oracle shop it was interesting to compare [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: April 13, 2007, 8:39pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• FastTrack seminar

  I’m blogging today from a Microsoft FastTrack seminar. Perpetual Technologies in Indianapolis is putting this on in some sort of collaboration with Microsoft. It’s a free seminar – and I’m always up for a free seminar – with a keynote and six sessions in three time slots.
  
  The [...]

  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: April 13, 2007, 8:28pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Javascript testing with NUnit

  I've been looking around for a good way to test Javascript functions.
  
  There are at least two if not more versions of JSUnit, one here and the other here. But there is one fundamental requirement I have for any unit testing framework, and that is that it [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: April 02, 2007, 7:49pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Sports and power ranking systems

  I've had an interest for a long time in the science of sports team rankings, for various reasons, which was forcibly brought to mind when I was filling out my tournament bracket. I'm always extremely mediocre in such game-picking contests, and when one blogger whom I respect said [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: March 14, 2007, 9:40pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Generating classes from XML in .Net

  The Oracle version of SQL has some nice keywords for returning your data in an XML format. (I suppose the other servers do too, but I've not used that feature.) When I get the XML back, I want to turn the XML into a set of business objects for easy [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: March 12, 2007, 7:46pm EDT
  by Ben Fulton

• Online and offline communities

  I wrote earlier about creating online communities around business-to-business applications, with a vague promise to add more, but didn't. What rejuvenated my interest in the topic was going to a lecture and buying a book by one Joseph Myers, who lectures on creating small groups for churches. Churches [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: March 08, 2007, 9:02pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Quality of Local Political Blogs: Compare and Contrast

  I've been writing various articles for Bloomingpedia in the last month or so, in an effort not so much to improve that site as to understand better the town in which I live. One of the keys to understanding a city, I think, is to gather a lot of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: March 06, 2007, 5:22am EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Bookplates

  (Hey, this is my 200th blog post! And it only took me three years!)
  
  
  
  One principle of agile development that doesn't get a lot of attention is Sitting Together. The point of the principle is simple: agility requires communication, and there's no faster communication than shouting [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 22, 2007, 9:09pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Government RSS Feeds

  Sophia Travis is a Monroe County Council member - and, remarkably, one who is sophisticated enough to have her own blog. On one post, she asks what information we'd like to see on the Monroe County web pages. I would like to see an RSS feed. Here's [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 16, 2007, 7:41pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Change is good

  I've accepted a new job with Envisage Technologies, a small software company in Bloomington. I'm excited about it as it's a company with a firm interest in agile principles:
  
  Do ideas by the Gang of Four, Steve McConnell, Martin Fowler, Tom DeMarco and Kent Beck resonate with you? [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 08, 2007, 7:02pm EST
  by Ben Fulton

• Prius anti-skid props

  The problem with having six inches of snow dumped on us is that the hill that leads to our house has a slope that isn't quite a vertical wall, but that's pretty close. So as I was heading home my wife assured me she'd seen the plow go by, and [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: February 06, 2007, 8:03pm EST
  by Ben Fulton