I've mentioned Tyner Blain quite frequently in my blog, and recently talked up their series on Software Estimation With Use Case Points. Well, if you're going to do estimation using use case points, you better know how to do use cases. Here's a good smattering of their articles on use cases. They have more. Follow the suggested reading links. The Difference Between Use Cases and Test Cases People who are new to software, requirements, or testing often ask “What’s the difference between a use case...

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This is from the BCL Team Blog: Developers using System.Text.RegularExpressi... with the RegexOptions.Compiled flag may notice performance degradation in their 2.0 apps when running on 64-Bit .NET Framework 2.0. The performance problem occurs in the Regex(String pattern, RegexOptions options) constructor when instantiating very large, un-optimized regular expressions and while specifying the RegexOptions.Compiled flag There is a hotfix available here, and the hotfix will be rolled into .NET...

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Today, May 25, is an interesting day in history. On this day in 1961, Project Apollo, with the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade is out" was announced. This, of course, put the "Space Race" in full gear. On this day in 1977, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was released. Of course, it wasn't titled that back then. "Episode IV: A New Hope" wasn't added to the title until the release of "Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back", confusing us all in the...

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Mark Miller has the goods. Refactor! for ASP.NET version 2.2 is shipping. Built by Developer Express, this FREE code refactoring tool includes 29 time-saving refactorings and is available to all developers working in Visual Studio 2005 and Orcas Beta 1. This release includes ten refactorings dedicated to ASP.NET development Add Validator Extract ContentPlaceHolder Extract ContentPlaceHolder (and create master page) Extract Style (Class) (I love this one) Extract Style (id) Extract to UserControl...

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GoogleMaps will show you how. I particularly like step 18

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Implementing critical sections is a problem we all stumble across from time-to-time. I recently was trying to do one in SQL, and discovered that it was harder than I expected. I didn't think of this method, which is a good one, by Louis Davidson. He uses Application Locks (sp_getapplock, sp_releaseapplock) to solve the problem, which does exactly what you need, of course. Usually critical sections are fairly easy to implement, but also must be handled carefully. You must make sure that a) nothing...

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3 Component Details Subscore Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7400 @ 2.16GHz 5.0 Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 4.7 Graphics NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M 3.5 Gaming graphics 399 MB Total available graphics memory 3.0 Primary hard disk 44GB Free (93GB Total) 5.0 Not all that impressive for a Dell Latitude D820, IMO. I do like that the disk is a 5. I expected the disk to be lower, since typically disk performance on laptop computers is, in a word, abysmal...

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Actually, I updated this blog to use FeedBurner a little while ago, but I'm finally comfortable with what it's doing. If you subscribe to this blog, please change your subscription to http://feeds.feedburner.com... I get better statistics that way. You shouldn't notice anything different. If you just go to this page manually, through a bookmark or something, keep doing it the same way you always have

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Scott Guthrie has a great post on how to limit your exposure to JSON hijacking in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. What's JSON hijacking? [T]hese attacks use HTTP GET requests invoked via an HTML <script src=""> include element to circumvent the "same origin policy" enforced by browsers (which limits JavaScript objects like XmlHttpRequest to only calling URLs on the same domain that the page was loaded from), and then look for ways to exploit the JSON payload content. The good news? ASP.NET AJAX do not enable...

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Another good find on CodeProject. From the Introduction: In WPF, an Adorner is special FrameworkElement that can be bounded to UIElement to allow a user to manipulate that element. By manipulate we mean: Adding functional handles to a UIElement that enable the user to manipulate the element in some way (resize, rotate, reposition, etc.). Provide visual feedback to indicate various states, or in response to various events. Overlay visual decorations on a UIElement. Visually mask or override part or...

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Here's an interesting AJAX style autocomplete textbox by Cassio Alves. He suggests using it in place of a "DropDownList with 50000 items". Now why wouldn't you want one of those? :) Anyway, check it out at CodeProject...

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I thought I posted this a long time ago, but when I searched for it to do an update, I couldn't find it...it was still in Draft form. So, now I can post the whole thing with the update at once. A new people search engine, Spock, will be debuting in the very near future. From the info at TechCrunch, it looks pretty cool, but will no doubt give rise to even more concerns about privacy on the web. From what I've seen, for people-related searches, this blows the doors off of Google, but we'll see what...

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PC World is reporting that your wonderful ReadyBoost drive doesn't boost your performance all that much in Vista. Sadly, that is my experience also. Yes, I finally got my new laptop and it's running 64-bit Vista Business. I haven't prepared a report on it yet, but that will be coming in the (relatively) near future. They sum up perfectly how ReadyBoost is supposed to work here: The premise is this: Although writing data to and reading it from a flash drive is in most cases slower than writing and...

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Well, I suppose this is good news. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is upping the specs for the next gen UMPC's, and offering some hope that they'll be cheaper. Even at $599, I'm still not sure why I would want one though. This seems to be a product in search of a market, which isn't usually a good business model. I'm sure there are some vertical markets for such a device (we talked about using something similar to manage food orders on race day at the suites at IMS, for example). I could possibly...

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For those of you who like utilties to do whatever you can come up with on your computer, and you prefer them free, here's one person's list of the 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities. I was happy to see that some of my favorites such as Notepad++ and Free Download Manager were on the list (he preferred EditPad Lite...I've used both EditPad Lite and EditPad Pro, which is not free, and Notepad++ is better than either). Anyway, it's a good list. I've marked several things from the list for download and...

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According to Microsoft Watch, Windows Server 2008 will be Microsoft's last 32-bit OS. After that, future Microsoft OSes will be 64-bit only. Microsoft Watch - Server - Microsoft Looks to 64-Bit Future UPDATE: engadget is reporting that the 64-bit move applies only to server products and not desktop products...

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If you've been programming in .NET for a while, you most likely have one or both of .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 installed. Visual Studio 2005 was released with .NET 2.0. .NET 3.0 was released along with Vista. .NET 3.5 is supposedly coming late this year with Orcas. If you're really lucky you may have one or two beta releases (hey, don't those get uninstalled?) of some of those as well. And don't forget those wonderful service packs. How do you tell what versions of the runtime are installed to verify...

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An excellent series on WPF by Josh Smith is available on CodeProject: Part 1 (XAML): Learn about XAML and how it is used in WPF applications. Part 2 (Layout): Learn about layout panels and how they are used to construct user interfaces. Part 3 (Data binding): Learn how WPF data binding works and how it can be used. Part 4 (Data templates and triggers): Learn how data templates and triggers work and how they can be used. Part 5 (Styles): Learn about how UIs can be styled in WPF. This series really...

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Neptune has been growing steadily warmer since 1980. No doubt this is due to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, rapid urbanization, jet airplanes, and other human influences. No, it's due to variations in the Sun's energy output. As it says on the World Climate Report blog: If for some reason you do not believe that the Sun is a significant player in determining the temperature of the Earth (after all, we are told repeatedly that humans are causing most of the observed warming on the Earth),...

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As I've said before, Iraq is exactly like Vietnam, except: We've captured Ho Chi Minh We occupy Hanoi We've helped the Vietnamese draft a Constitution We've helped the Vietnamese go to the voting booth three times (the first three times ever) The new government of Vietnam has tried and executed Ho Chi Minh. As the InstaPundit points out, the graph would look a bit different if we were comparing unfavorable news reports. UPDATE: Riel World View has some actual numbers, year by year. I like the pretty...

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There's a good article here by Frank Kerrigan on a way to implement paging in SQL Server 2005 by using Common Table Expressions (CTE's). What are CTE's? This is a new feature of SQL Server 2005 that helps you eliminate temp tables and cursors in your queries. You can generate some pretty amazing queries using recursive CTE's, but that's not what Frank is trying to demonstrate. Anyway, they can be used similarly to a derived table. Here's the syntax:[ WITH <common_table_expression... [ ,...n ]...

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Good post on CodingHorror about using PNG's and shrinking their footprint as small as possible. Conclusion? If you're not using PNGOUT, then you're just throwing away bandwitdh

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I was doing a little research for a project the other day and stumbled upon this article on Informit.Com. It's old (2002), so it doesn't even take into account new features in SQL Server 2005 (NEWSEQUENTIALID()), but does give you something to think about regarding GUIDs. This table in particular is an eye-opener: Result of Test A: INSERT of 500,000 Orders Test A Time (with 500,000 Orders) INTEGER 1 GUID 30 GUID (COMB) 1.1 To see what the difference between GUID and GUID(COMB) is, you'll have to...

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