The easiest way to save money and time building software products is to only build things that are absolutely essential. More features and frameworks means more code to write, more code to test and more code to go wrong. The… Read More
Developing HTML Forms
Developing useful and professional HTML forms requires a lot more work than simple examples might suggest. There are a whole range of problems such as handling initial data, client-side validation, server-side validation, optimistic concurrency and performing the final action. This… Read More
Ideas on How to Split User Stories
Breaking large user stories (or work items in layman’s terms) down into several smaller ones hugely improves delivery predictability. There are several reasons for this including the fact that smaller items with fewer moving parts are simply easier to estimate… Read More
TDD or Test Driven Development Explained
TDD or Test Driven Development is something that’s easy to talk about but harder to do and a lot harder to do well and get value from. Done with good judgement TDD can help produce excellent quality code that is… Read More
Building a Test Email Server
This post explains how to set up an email server on GNU/Linux that can be used for testing applications. It allows you to test that emails are correctly addressed (except for BCC) and allows you to receive the emails and… Read More
Knockout JS Validation using an AJAX Callback Result
I was looking for an easy way to implement a validation based on the result of an AJAX request without making it synchronous. I noticed that Knockout JS Validation wraps it’s calls to validation functions in a computed observable. This… Read More
NGINX and Mono Concurrency
I stumbled upon a question about fastcgi-mono-server concurrency on Server Fault and thought I’d do some digging around. Initial checks using a couple of open tabs in the browser and Firebug seemed like there was some level of blocking, and… Read More
ASP.NET MVC on Ubuntu with NGINX
We’ve just published an early working version of an on-line service created by NewRedo, however, although written in ASP.NET MVC 2, it’s not running on a Microsoft server. Instead we’re running on Ubuntu 11.10 using the NGINX web server. First,… Read More