The better part of this summer after work and on the weekends I spent restoring my boat.  My sister and I planned a camping trip for the nephews the weekend of August 7th and I didn’t want to go to the lake about an hour away without my boat.  Problem, the boat has been at a buddy’s lake house for about two years and is starting to show wear.  It is time for some TLC and restoration.  In cases like this it is always best to have a buddy who A) has more experience than you and B)...

  http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-35-why-comments-are-evil-and-pair-programming-with-corey-haines/   In this episode we sat down good friend and Ruby developer Corey Haines.  Corey has been traveling around doing pair programming with anybody and everybody.   In this show we discussed why comments are evil.  We are talking about those little comments developers sprinkle in their code.  Corey enlightens us as to why we should rethink using comments. Then we discuss pair programming.  A great show all the way around.  Hope you enjoy it as much as we did recording it. 

  http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-34-the-world-according-to-tim-huckaby/   In this episode we sat down with Tim Huckaby and discussed an array things including Rich Internet Applications, advice for developers and a variety of stories.  WARNING Tim’s audio is very sub-par and we apologize in advance.  If you listen to the show with speakers and not a headset, it is tolerable.   We are still working on fixing it to make it better. 

New to Visual Studio and .Net development?  If so, this short eight minute video will get you started in learning how to use Visual Studio to develop on the .Net platform.  In this first installment you will learn the layout of Visual Studio and how to organize windows within Visual Studio and customize the layout. Hope you enjoy.

Here is a medical update for Friday.  I decided to blog because A) it wouldn’t fit in 140 characters B) not everyone is on Facebook C) DRY (don’t repeat yourself).  Here’s the latest. I saw the doctor that operated on my chest on Thursday mid-morning.  He said I was healing nicely and the biggest news is the tissue he took out was benign (in other words not cancerous). That’s a HUGE relief!  The doctor did say there was cell activity and it would have continued to grow so it was a good thing it was taken out.  All in...

Last week I blogged I was having two surgeries.  I had one surgery on Wednesday and then another on Thursday.  I have to say back to back surgeries were not fun but more importantly the second surgery is the one that took the wind out of my sails. I did ok on the first surgery.  After a couple of days I would have been fine and able to go back to work. The second surgery I had was an eye surgery.  The official name of the surgery is called “Scleral buckle and vitrectomy”.  Don’t worry I didn’t know what...

A few weeks ago I was shopping with my lovely wife and her Mother in Jackson, Ms.  I bumped into a rack of clothes with my chest and it was painful, very sore.  I got to feeling around why I was sore and discovered a lump on my right breast.  Surgery #1 A few days later I saw a doctor and then another and got scheduled to have surgery.  Tomorrow morning, (Wednesday August 19th 2009), I will be having a procedure called “Subcutaneous Mastectomy”.  Basically the tissue or whatever alien object that is in my breast is...

Yesterday evening at work a team member and I were pair programming.  We had a disagreement about how to code a few lines.  The question was around whether to use the ?? operator or to use an if statement using String.IsNullOrEmpty.  We settled it like most developers do and that is with a benchmark.  Here’s the fun we had. To give you an idea as to what we were doing here’s some context.  We had a function that took an object.  We wanted to add extra context data to the object, but only if the object didn’t have it...