Guidance Explorer will tell you what To Do and what not to Do

Over to Scott for more details about Patterns and Practices Guidance Explorer. It looks promising. Thanks Scott.

ORM community site

Roy Esherove has created new community site which is devoted to ORM stuff. This gut doesn't stop amazing me :) which is good. If you are intrested in this topic give a try and contribute at some stage.

Developing software is not the same as selling carpets

Again something interesting from Joel. And my two cents. I would like to emphasize a thought that he presents at the end of the post. In short you have to know the field you run your company in. It’s obvious that developing software is different then selling carpets. I’m not saying one is more difficult then the other I’m saying they are different.

Assess yourself and find out what can be improved.

Just go to John Skeet’s blog and assess yourself. In short, are you really able to work in a team?

#1 - Overengineering (in complexity and/or performance)

I agree. It’s important that your algorithm/method has time complexity O(n) instead of O(eⁿ) but it’s not very often really important whether you use foreach or for loop. Mind that the first one makes code much more readable. But I have to emphasize that casting to String and calling ToString method is a different kettle of fish because if you call ToString it means you are not sure what kind of object you handle and I call it “text based programming” which I hate :).

Personal guilt rating: 5(but I’m aware of it and I’m working on it)

#2 - Not considering the code's readership

I agree. I think that there should be even a subject during everyone’s studies that deals with code maintability.

Personal guilt rating: 2(Yes, I’m really mad about it)

#3 - Assuming your code works

According to the quantum physics theory everything is possible to some extent – just probability. Therefore I don’t assume anything :).

Personal guilt rating: 4

#4 - Using the wrong tool for the job

I’ve noticed that if a company is Microsoft oriented then it doesn’t even consider using Open Source software and the other way around if a company comes from the Linux world it hates Microsoft solutions just because it comes from Microsoft. It’s strange but true.

 Personal guilt rating: 2 (Yes, I’m big fan of Mono project)

#5 - Excessive code pride

I have to be proud of my code but from time to time I probably should just keep saying: It’s not my baby, it’s not my baby…

Personal guilt rating: 4

#6 - Failing to acknowledge weaknesses

I think that it’s a good habit to mention to people (at the end of the conversation) that I am not sure about this and that and they should check it on their own.

Personal guilt rating: 3

#7 - Speaking with an accent

I don’t like using any technology/tool/approach I don’t know/understand and I think that a coping of some patterns it’s really possible only if someone doesn’t know the technology/tool/approach he/she uses.

Personal guilt rating: 3

C# via CLR - looks good :)

I've just come across C# via CLR by Jeffrey Richter. It must be interesting and worth reading. Just how to get it very quickly :)?