In ideal world Developers would know exactly how to build a test from “never changing” business expectations and will develop 100% bug free and working code.

Everyone knows how far we are from ideal world and because we are a human beings the main driver of development is different then the desired one.

My few years of development experience thought me that there is a wide variety of technically non related drivers in development. Here they come

Pattern (Ambitious) Driven Development

Someone who has read a lot of books with good coding practices and software design patterns and the simplest code tries to build using a number of patterns. Explanation will be something along lines: For benefits of future changes and improvements.

Blog Driven Development

Writing a code and looking for possible technical difficulties so they can be presented as post on a blog.

End/Beginning of the Week Driven Development

Either to tired after a whole week of work or pissed of that it’s Monday already to do proper work and code.

Copy Paste Driven Development

“Wait, I’ve seen it in a code somewhere. Let’s just take this entire part and past it in here”. Seen it many times, specially when writing tests. Very often test is not testing what it suppose to after.

Google Driven Development

Very similar to Copy Paste Driven Development. Only difference is that Google provides code results to paste.

Hacking Driven Development

I have to say that I’ve been trapped very often in this one. It’s when there is a technical issue, like integration point and starting as a spike to find a best way to solve the problem it turns into hacking entire solution.

Put any more you can think off.

Cheers, Greg

Gregster and The Fmily

Greg and The Family

Enjoy, Greg and The Family

Client that I work for at the moment has one disable toilet with shower. I use this toilet to change and shower when I arrive on my bike to work. There is couple of things in this toilet that made me generally think about the design and find analogy in software, AND more exactly in Web Interfaces. I have stumble upon those issues all the time, on BIG GUN web sites (like banking interfaces) and on small private web sites.

Problem 1

So, I’m on this web site and it has an topic specific content and somewhere along the interface I see a button. Placing it in a context of a site and the interface it should read BLABLA and it should cause BLABLA action. That is what I think because rest of the page and it’s content is giving me this feeling. Now, when I read the button I see BLUBLU. First reaction is confusion, why is this button there and more important what does it do. Pressing this could cause world to go BLUBLU or it could ended in BLABLA. Very often the button is actually doing what I’m thinking of it. But why the dodgy name?

Now, the toilet example. So here we have a button in disable toilet. Placed next to a toilet seat. I would think it has something to do with a emergency or panic button.

But when I take a closer look I see:

Hm ……. Is it a RESET for a missing toilet paper?

Problem 2

On the web site again. This time it’s a banking application. And I’m trying to transfer some money from my current account to my savings account (example old as … as a banking applications). So I read Help/FAQ for my cool online banking system and it says to do BLABLA on BLEBLE page to achieve it. So I go to BLEBLE page and not in a million years I’m able to find it. This example is not specific to banking applications only. I step upon dozen of web application everyday where you read one thing but can’t do the other. Well, with the cool toilet we got here I can see something like this.

I tried hard to find the RED STRIP, and it’s not there. I can see the shavers only wall plug and a hand dryer, but no red strips. The INFO is not only wrong (giving outdated information) is also in a wrong place.

Hit the bottom

When you design an interface, please make sure you think of a people that are going to use it. Put proper labels on your action links/buttons. Don’t give false guidelines for usage and place them in a proper place.

Stay focus, Greg

Ps. Sorry for the poor picture quality. Made with my mobile, plus it’s really dark in there

Enjoy, Oliwia, Joanna and Greg

Greg and The Familly

One of the interesting things we came across this week was a config file for web   application, so called Web.config. So we desired to switch some settings based on environment where application was deployed. Simplest thing we could think of was referring in a config section to external file with settings. Something like this:

…

<web.model configSource=”file.with.config” />

…

Deployment with NAnt was just deploying proper file to server and all was automated.

Everything was beautiful until appSettings. It is impossible in Web.config to specify multiple sources for appSettings. It is the section of config file where you can create your own configuration properties and set its values. Later in application you can use it. It looks like this:

…

<appSettings>

<add key=”my_cool_property” value=”extra_awesome_value” />

</appSettings>

…

So, it is possible to point appSettings section into a file but it can be only one file. So if you would like different parts of your application be configured in different config files, forget it.

So, we have ended up with custom section in Web.config. It is absolutely possible to do it, only thing is that when configuration manager is reading config file it needs to know how to read this settings. To achieve the same result as appSettings we need simple Key - Value collection read from configuration.

First we need to define a custom section in our web config.

<configSections>

<section name=”myAwasomeSection” type=”System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler” />

</configSections>

And then in our section something we can configure whatever we want.

<myAwesomeSection>

<add key=”some_key” value=”some_value_blabla” />

</myAwesomeSection>

We can ask in application for configuration properties by asking ConfigurationManager, something like this:

ConfigurationManager.GetSection(”myAwesomeSection”)

This guy will return an object of System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection

From this point we are home. We can get all configuration properties we need I hope this will help someone. At least I have some reference to go back to.

Good source of information on custom sections is this article http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ConfigSections.aspx

Cheers, Gregster

Enjoy

Oliwia, Joanna and Gregster