software development
Every software project I’ve ever worked on has accrued technical debt over time: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is
code quality
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve probably heard about the game Katamari Damacy. The gameplay consists of little more than rolling stuff up into an ever-increasing ball of stuff. That’s literally all you do. You start by rolling up
refactoring
I’m often asked why the book Refactoring isn’t included in my recommended developer reading list. Although I own the book, and I’ve read it twice, I felt it was too prescriptive – if you see (x), then you must do (y). Any programmer worth his or her salt
visual studio 2005
I constantly rename variables. It’s probably the single most frequent refactoring activity I do. And that’s why I love Visual Studio 2005’s built-in Smart Tags feature. If you’re not familiar with smart tags, check out K. Scott Allen’s post; he has some nice screenshots
refactoring
There was much handwringing last week when Somasegar announced what we already knew: VB.NET 2005 will not have refactoring. This resulted in a few emotional outbursts: We don’t need toys like [the] MY [namespace], we need working tool like Refactoring!! How can Microsoft refuse us those magical software