Yesterday I attended the 2nd Software Craftsmanship meeting, led by Uri Lavi, held in the headquarters of PicScout. The main agenda for the evening was Bad Code: identifying bad code, code smells, and using tools to identify bad code. Uri gave an in-depth presentation about most common code smells, such as huge nested switch/case statements, and explained how to refactor them into a working, beautiful code. After the talk, the group had split into two: Java and .NET developers, and they were given a Dojo-style assignment: Create a class which displays a given integer as...

Badges are an integral part of the StackOverflow, which reward participants. According to Jeff Atwood, those are based on the Xbox 360 Achievement System. Some time ago I suggested on meta that it should be possible to easily identify which question or answer (when applicable) awarded the badge. This request was met by an initial refusal, stating that the user should figure out himself why the badge was awarded. This quickly became a heated issue, as I was not the only one who wanted this feature implemented. At the time, the badge system was not designed for this. I am happy to...

We are looking for a .NET/C++ developer to join the growing Typemock ranks. You need to: Live in Israel Know .NET very well (at least 3 years .NET experience – VB.NET or C#, and willing to learn the other one) Have some C++ experience (recent – sometime in the past couple of years) Be interested in Agile development, unit testing and TDD (you don’t have to be an expert. You’ll become one on the job!) Have very good English ...

As I’m writing this, Dror Helper blogged about using a “poor man’s performance profiler”. This profiling technique is useful when the tools are lacking, and we need to measure a performance of method(s) within our code. This information is usually logged, and after a run we’re left with a huge file containing hundreds (and sometimes thousands of lines). How do we make sense of this mess? How do we filter out and understand the relevant performance information? As it happens, Microsoft Excel is a great tool to assist with this task! Excel is this part of Microsoft Office, which...

Note: this is part 2. Read part 1 of the trip here. Early Saturday morning on Islay, and we are set to go on another adventure! After eating a delicious breakfast that our lovely host prepared for us, we were set to try and explore some more distilleries. Unfortunately there were no tours at Lagavulin and Ardbeg on a Saturday, so we decided to drive to the place where one of my most favorite pictures was taken - the Carraig Fhada Lighthouse. It was a relatively short drive, the road eventually becomes almost undrivable. We parked our...

Every whisky lover gets, at some point, to experience whisky from the island of Islay in Scotland. This experience will be remembered throughout his life - it can be either love at first taste, or loathing for eternity. Not everybody can handle the intensity and the powerful peaty flavor of (most) Islay whiskies, some may even stop drinking whisky altogether. Others, like myself, fall in love with the flavor and rarely able to drink anything else. The magic that is Islay begins to show its beauty even on the way to the island. Either by a flight from...

I use the awesome Fiddler2 to debug HTTP, and I needed to compare sessions. Fiddler has a support for this, but when I clicked Tools - Compare Sessions, it prompted me to install Windiff.exe. I haven't found a way to set the preferred Diff tool in the UI (via Options), so after looking at the click handler for the menu in Reflector, I found out that the value can be set via Registry key: Open Registry, go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Fiddler2 Add a new String Value called CompareTool and set the...

Google "recursion".

Skype for the iPhone was released in the App Store today. Unfortunately, it was crashing on startup - it showed the Skype blue logo and then crashed back to the home screen. A quick Google query led me to discover that I'm not alone - this affects many "jailbroken" iPhone users. UPDATE: To fix this on a jailbroken iPhone, update the package "Mobile Substrate" on Cydia to version 0.9.2803-1 (or higher). After the update Skype works great!

I just found out that it's possible to copy the text from any message box to clipboard by pressing Ctrl-C when the message box appears! Think of all the times you needed to search for an exact error message text, and needed to switch back and forth between the message and your browser window. For example: Pressing Ctrl-C will copy the following to the clipboard: [Window Title] notepd [Content] Windows cannot find 'notepd'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. [OK] This also works in Windows XP.