Latest articles and blog posts
The NimblePros team members have deep connections within
Microsoft and the developer community. They write regularly for
NimblePros' Agile
Perspectives and on their blogs about their experiences, new
developments and discoveries, and the latest trends.
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
So as a bit of fun, since I just wrote a post about duck typing and foreach loops, I thought I would take a look at what’s happening under the hood when we use this trick. To start with, I will ...
Read more » Fun with IL DASM and Duck Typing
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
When we last saw our hero, he had fallen victim to an evil plot to disable his computer’s ability to boot up. After great efforts at recovery, eventually he was forced to concede defeat...
Read more » Laptop Rebuild - Essential Apps
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
I have a client who lists as one of the key challenges with implementing agile practices with their teams as managing to define user stories that are valuable but not too big. This is actuall...
Read more » Stories Too Big - Vertical Slices
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
Recently I picked up an HP MediaSmart EX470 Windows Home Server to help consolidate my files at home and to provide a simple backup solution. It’s been great and it’s an extremely...
Read more » XBox 360 - Home Media Center
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
I’ve been working with Azure off and on since last summer, and like any new API or platform, there are hurdles involved with the learning curve. This is especially true for pre-release ...
Read more » Learning To Code with the Azure SDK - Show Me The Code
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
Last week I encountered a problem with Outlook that I’m happy to report I’ve just solved. I found a bunch of things on the Interwebs that looked like they might be useful, but non...
Read more » Outlook Send Mail Infinite Loop - Message in Outbox
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
I just finished my DevReach Online presentation, A Whirlwind Tour of Software Development Fundamentals. In this 45-minute talk, I covered what I consider to be fundamental principles, ...
Read more » DevReach Online 2010 - Software Fundamentals
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 01 Feb 2012
One of my applications relies on a singleton pattern to create a single instance of a server which processes requests from many different ASP.NET handlers. It is created using pretty much sta...
Read more » Code Review Singleton Pattern Issues
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Mon, 30 Jan 2012
The coding dojo at CodeMash 2012 was a blast this year. I ran two events in the dojo: a group exercise doing the Gilded Rose kata and the Ball Flow agile game. I thought the gilded rose kata we did...
Read more » Ball Flow Recap: CodeMash Coding Dojo
From Blog
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Posted on Fri, 27 Jan 2012
I’ve been reading a bunch of kanban and lean books recently as I work on my Pluralsight course on Introducing Kanban (not published yet – will link to it when it is). The most recent one I’ve...
Read more » Reviewing Scrumban the Book
From Blog
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Posted on Thu, 26 Jan 2012
So, yesterday I posted a review of the new Asus Ultrabook and, as has become rather predictable lately, the virtual web server hosting my Graffiti-powered blog started having 100% CPU for quite a w...
Read more » Updating Blog to Orchard and Switching Domains
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Wed, 25 Jan 2012
Now that CodeMash is over, it’s about time that I deposited information about my experiences at CodeMash 2012 here. This was my third time at this event that always offers great sessions, workshop...
Read more » CodeMash 2012 Recap
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 25 Jan 2012
Hi, I'm Steve Smith. I go by Ardalis online because, well, you'd understand if your name was Steve Smith.
This is now the fifth place I've had a blog, if you don't count my initial home page...
Read more » About Steve
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 25 Jan 2012
Last week a received a new Asus UX31E Zenbook Ultrabook laptop computer, which I’ve been putting through the paces. I’d like to write up my thoughts on the unboxing and my initial impression ...
Read more » Asus Zen Ultrabook First Impressions
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 18 Jan 2012
If you’re at all serious about testing, at some point you’re going to have a rather large suite of tests that need to run, and you’ll find that your builds are taking longer than you would like bec...
Read more » Run Your Unit Tests in Parallel to Maximize Performance
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 18 Jan 2012
There remains a fair bit of confusion about what constitutes which kind of test. Many developers are fairly new to testing, and tend to call any tests of their code “unit tests” even when the...
Read more » Unit Test or Integration Test and Why You Should Care
From Blog
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Posted on Mon, 16 Jan 2012
Last week I presented two half-day workshops at CodeMash’s PreCompiler on Wednesday (with Brendan Enrick), and a session on ASP.NET MVC 4 on Thursday. CodeMash 2012 was an amazing conference ...
Read more » CodeMash 2012 Sessions
From Blog
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Posted on Fri, 09 Dec 2011
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain Today, Silverlight 5 is released and available for download! The Release Candidate has been around for some time, an...
Read more » Silverlight 5
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Tue, 29 Nov 2011
In software development, it is very important to continually learn and experiment with new techniques for building great software. Our job is to learn and improve the quality of code that we build ...
Read more » Overusing Interfaces and Injection
From Blog
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Posted on Thu, 10 Nov 2011
There’s a great site for finding extension methods, ExtensionMethod.net. I don’t believe either of these came from there, and I’ve not (yet) submitted them there, but here are a couple of ext...
Read more » Handy EnumerableExtensions
From Blog
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Posted on Thu, 10 Nov 2011
If you’re working on creating a pleasant-looking HTML email template for your site’s newsletter, you’ll want to test it out on the major email clients, including Outlook and GMail. For instan...
Read more » View HTML Source of Email in GMail and Google Apps
From Blog
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Posted on Sat, 29 Oct 2011
Using lazy initialization in C#, a class’s state is set up such that each property’s get method performs a check to see if the underlying field is null. If it is, then it calculates or popula...
Read more » Inner Fields and Lazy Initialization in C#
From Blog
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Posted on Wed, 26 Oct 2011
I’ve been using RazorEngine on a project and have been impressed with its simplicity and ease-of-use. However, the performance of the application isn’t quite where I need it to be, and I was ...
Read more » RazorEngine Performance and Template Caching
From Blog
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Posted on Tue, 25 Oct 2011
You can use the sc.exe command to install an EXE as a service on Windows Server 2008. There’s a good article on creating an application that can easily run as either a console app or as a ser...
Read more » Install Application as Service on Windows Server 2008
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Thu, 11 Aug 2011
This will surprise some of you that know me or the company I work for, but not all of our staff are experts with ASP.NET MVC. In fact, I am hoping that the couple who aren’t will read this po...
Read more » Types of ASP.NET MVC 3 Action Results
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Fri, 05 Aug 2011
This year’s Cleveland GiveCamp was a great success. The event ended with the completion of 23 software projects for 23 organizations who needed the support of a lot of fantastic developers. The Giv...
Read more » Developers Give Back
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Fri, 05 Aug 2011
One of the most powerful tool available to developers testing a legacy code base is the ability to mock out classes that their code depends on. This is of great importance since our unit tests need...
Read more » Overmocking
From Brendan Enrick
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Posted on Fri, 15 Jul 2011
In ASP.NET MVC, our system is built such that the interactions with the user are handled through Actions on our Controllers. We select our actions based on the route the user is using, which is a f...
Read more » Custom Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC