Why you need good requirements

pre-sales    project management    projects    requirements
Clearly defined requirements are essential to the success of any good software project. Both clients and developers alike benefit from well elaborate solution definition. Here's why.

King of the gym

weight training
Never done 1RM before but my Gym now has a weights records board up so I had to try and get on it.

Up your muscle growth with Spike days

weight training
Add a spike day to your workout every 14-21 days to get that extra super growth

How to complain

Everyone complains at some point in their life. People complain both professionally and in their private lives. The most base form of complaint is "X sucks". That's no good to anyone. Even if you use more politically correct wording than "sucks". You need to expand on your complaint if you want things to change.

A first look at Umbraco List View Types

cms    umbraco
This option on Document Types quietly slipped into the Umbraco 7 release. It may have been a quiet release but it's a big deal. Why? Well, Container Content Types allow us to reduce the number of items in the content tree and for people working in the back end this provides for a faster experience. Content is also more easily searched (in my opinion) and more easily browsed.

Codemasters F1 data feed updated

f1 2012    f1speed    projects
With F1 2012 Codemasters updated their data feed to include a whole set of useful extra parameters, including sector information, lap change data, KERS, DRS, and a whole bunch more.

Creating a generic test base class that will mock dependencies

castle windsor    dependency injection    design patterns    unit testing
A base test class using Castle Windsor and the ILazyComponentLoader so I don't have to manually setup my mocks. Uses NSubstitute and NUnit too.

Creating https bindings for IIS on the command line

iis
I've got a script 'ResetEnvironment' that developers can use to reset their developer environment when something goes screwy, or to create the environment when they are first starting on the project. The script has fully automated new environments, except for adding the HTTPS binding to the website in IIS. This always had to be done manually. Another developer has joined the project and I thought this was a good time to really sort this problem out, so we don't have to manually do this step whenever we reset our environment.

Building your own custom FluentValidation validator

asp.net    asp.net mvc    fluentvalidation
How to make your own fluent validator for the FluentValidation framework for .NET

Utilising the render field pipeline when using Glass for Sitecore

Glass Mapper    sitecore
How I invoke Sitecores RenderField pipeline when using Glass.Mapper.Sc without having to use magic string (gimme type safety!)

Getting started with Sitecore MVC as an ASP.NET MVC developer

Glass Mapper    asp.net mvc    sitecore
Sitecore introduced MVC back in version 6.6.0 in the middle of 2012. I'm just now getting started with it. Here's a getting started guide from the perspective of an experience ASP.NET MVC developer. Hopefully it's also useful for people who aren't experienced MVC developers.

Using HTML5 video and knockoutjs

HTML5    knockoutjs
I've been playing with video in HTML5 for the last few weeks and trying out a few javascript video players. I settled on JWplayer for use with my knockout.js view model.

Selecting the previous event from a schedule

c#
How I went about selecting the activities / event from a schedule of defined activities when I needed the last performed set of activties.

Encapsulating repository queries

design patterns    domain driven design    linq to sql    nhibernate
I've moved away from putting query (eg GetCondition / FindCondition) o n my repositories. Now I create queries objects for each would be method. Why?

Updated Web Essentials 2012 and now Visual Studio 2012 crashes?

visual studio
Did you just install Web Essentials 2012 version 2.5.1 and now Visual Studio 2012 crashes? The fix is simple. Disable, delete, renable.

A knockoutjs binding for twitter bootstraps popover

javascript    jquery    knockoutjs    twitter bootstrap
A custom knockoutjs binding for twitter bootstraps popover. This provides declaring popover using knockoutjs, assigning custom html, ensuring only one popover is open at any one time, and closing the popover from a button or link within the popover.

iRacing Star Mazda Round 1 2013.1 review

iRacing    simracing    star mazda
My first race for the Vortex team, racing in iRacing's Star Mazda series. This week visited Spa, in the Belgian forest. I was initially only going for 1 race but ended up doing 4.