Several weeks ago, I started the process of converting this blog to a responsive design.  At this point it is mostly done.  But it is done enough that I can tell you the process that I went through to get the site converted. I was surprised by how easy the process was.  But I guess I was lucky because the theme I started out with already was following a number of best practices. So, to start out with, if you want to move your site toward responsive web design, there are some prerequisites that you’ll need to pay attention to.

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This past week a very old (last time I did work for him was in 2007) client of mine contacted me because their program suddenly started exhibiting a problem.  It seems that if a user enters a date anytime in 2015, the program displays an error message indicating that they need to enter a date greater than today and less than two years from today.

When I went to replicate the error in my debugger, I discovered this bit of code:

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if (Year < 100)
{
    if (Year < 15)
    {
        Year += 2000;
    }
    else
    {
        Year += 1900;
    }
}

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A couple of weeks ago, we discussed Value types and Reference types where we said that a reference type points to the value it represents and a value type is the value it represents. This has implications when we work with the assignment operator because when you assign a reference type and change the content of what it is pointing to, both variables get changed because they are both pointing to the same location in memory.  If you do this with a value type, only the one you change sees the change because you are working with a copy.

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Many people starting out with Unit testing get stuck when it comes to using their tools with the Visual Studio environment.  If it isn’t built in, how do we make it work with Visual Studio?  In this article I want to explore the basics of creating a unit test for NUnit and getting it running from Visual Studio.

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It is amazing to me how few programmers understand the fundamentals of how variables work.  Not just in .NET or C# specifically, but in every language they work in.  It amazes me for two reasons.  First, I don’t think I could program if I didn’t understand what was physically happening as a result of the code I was writing.  Not knowing how the variables relate to the memory that they use would be, to me, a major limitation.  But it also amazes me because I don’t think anyone can program intelligently until they do know what is happening. So, I’ll start from the outside and move in to what’s happening in memory.

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So, today I had the task of removing the leaves from my yard, which gave me a lot of time to think because it is a pretty solitary job, even if you have people helping you, because much of the time I was using a leaf blower.  It is pretty hard to hold any kind of conversation when you are using a leaf blower.

And  as I was running the leaf blower, I was thinking about what I was going to talk about today.  And then it struck me, why not just talk about cleaning up the leaves?  I mean if John Sonmez and Scott Hanselman can talk about stuff that isn’t necessarily programming related, why can’t I?

But then I realized, I could talk about cleaning up the leaves in my yard AND talk about programming at the same time.

Think about it.

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My son is learning to program.  Last week he asked me to explain C# properties get and set and, as it turns out, it looks like many others are asking for the same.  So, I’ve decided to spend the time on this post, explaining getters and setters in about as much detail as one can expect. So here it goes…

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This happened a couple of years ago, but it is still relevant because I know of at least one place where it is still happening even though Microsoft has fixed the issue that initially caused this hack to be put in place in the first place.

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This week I discovered CSS Animations.  Well, I shouldn’t say I discovered it so much as I finally spent some time figuring out what it is and why I would care about it.  This could make so much of what we normally do in JavaScript entirely unnecessary.  So, more for my own benefit than anything else, I thought today I would just create a list of resources that are available. But first, why would you want to use CSS for animation when JavaScript could do it just as well?

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I had an interesting puzzle to solve this week that I thought I would share with you in case someone else is looking for a similar solution. There was some code that I needed to test that ultimately called into the database. Since this is a UNIT test and all I was interested in testing was one specific function and the state of one specific field in another  object, I had neither the need, nor the desire, to let that call to the database happen.  Since MOQ is  my mocking framework of choice, I wanted to mock out the database object the method was using so that it would return whatever was expected without actually calling down into the database. There were several problems.  The first was that the database object is a private field in the class I was testing and it got created by the constructor.  Second, the code that needed to use the database object is passing the object by reference (using the “ref” keyword) so that I could no setup my class that needed that object to just ignore it. There were some other items I needed to inject, but they were pretty straight forward.

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