For my current client we have an environment where the application is handed over to a deployment team that installs it onto varying test servers. For good reason these servers are locked down and the development teams can not access them. This ensures a clean install and ensures that the version in the test environments gets moved forward only if there are no issues. Problem 1 - Setup.exe has "baked in" URL This plays a bit of havoc when deploying smart client applications. One of the reasons for this is that the setup.exe bootstrapper has the URL baked...

Resharper has to be one of the biggest boosts I have found to my productivity. This tool has so many little time saving features that I will probably gain days of productivity every month. For anyone that has not heard of this tool, Resharper is a visual studio add-in made by JetBrains that adds a plethora of time saving shortcuts. I thought I would share a few of my favourites: alt+enter some context sensitive help. For instance if you write a line like this: ICustomer customer = new Customer(); ...

Recently I have been helping several other developers in the shop I am consulting at and realized another item for this series: Removing Pain. I am amazed by how many times I see developers repeating the same things over and over again. Builds/Deployments Builds should be the simplest and most repeatable thing you do in a day. If you have a checklist on your desk of steps then stop and automate. It is such a time saver to have a script that will do the things you need it to do. Wether it...

I think WCF is a pretty sweet technology stack. It makes things work with each other quite easily..... until you use it for more than the default it was setup to handle. This usually results in some strange and hard to diagnose error messages. The #1 tip I have so far is to use the SvcConfigEditor.exe file that comes with the Windows SDK to edit your configuration files as it allows you to edit the configuration in a simple and visual fashion and makes it much harder to make errors in your config...

If you have ever wanted to learn nHibernate from an experienced developer now is your chance. The one and only James Kovacs is offering a three day nHibernate course in Calgary this August that you don't want to miss. James is an expert in nHibernate and I could not think of a better person to offer this course.  Check out the announcement on his website: http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/CourseAnnouncementObjectRelationalMappingWithNHibernate.aspx