Friday with Filip – Know your tools

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 09 Nov 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

There's a saying that goes like this:

Use the right tool for the right job

Friday with Filip – Dependency cycles & Spaghetti code

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 02 Nov 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

Last week I shared the first part in a very interesting session that I had the pleasure to do with Patrick over at NDepend. Having readable code and manageable solutions is very important but in some cases small changes that might see, trivial to you, might not be as trivial to someone else. [...]

Microsoft delivers at BUILD 2012

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 01 Nov 2012

Yesterday was the first day of //BUILD/ at Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Seattle. There has been a lot of expectations on Microsoft for this event and boy did they deliver! The past year has been all about Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the very awesome updates to Windows Azure. //BUILD/ this year follows in its predecessor´s footsteps and deliver information about how we can write awesome applications for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. [...]

Friday with Filip – Demystify Spaghetti Code

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 26 Oct 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

Two weeks ago we looked at Dealing with Code Complexity using NDepend. This was the first episode in the webinar series on Code Quality. [...]

Friday with Filip – Do you deliver high quality?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 19 Oct 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

During the Fridays with Filip we've looked at how to ensure that certain parts of your project conforms to a high standard. I'm talking about the following [...]

10 questions about Surface

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 17 Oct 2012

The Microsoft Surface is due to be released October 26, 2012 and this is less than 10 days from now. There's been a lot of hype around this particular tablet and I'm very happy that the release date is in just 1½ weeks! [...]

Friday with Filip – Dealing with Code Complexity

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 12 Oct 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

Yet another interesting week has passed with lots of things to discuss. Before we dig into this week's subject, I just want to take a brief moment to share something interesting that I found (it was recommended by someone I know from IRC). There's a hosting company called EDIS based in Austria that is now providing a very neat service; Raspberry Pi Colocation! [...]

Friday with Filip – Joining new projects

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 05 Oct 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

The last three Fridays we've looked at how to become more productive, how to increase security in your web applications and how to adapt to a real testing strategy. This week I want to talk about how I get deep into the new projects that I join, fast. The projects that I'm referring to are those that have been developed on before. The customer never really wants to pay for you to spend too much time learning the code base and the actual project, so you'll have to use tools that will help you do so fast. [...]

Creating a Direct2D game for WinRT

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 01 Oct 2012

If you want to write a game for Windows 8 and was thinking of using XNA, think again. When creating games for Windows 8 you'll have to go back to using DirectX. But don't worry, with Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8, you'll get a lot of help doing so. Let's have a look on how to create a Direct2D game for WinRT!

The first thing we would have to do is to fire up Visual Studio and create a new Direct2D project. Can't find it in the C# section for Windows Store applications? That's because we'll have to use C++ for this! You'll find the project template in Other Languages -> Visual C++ -> Windows Store -> Direct2D App (XAML) [...]

Friday with Filip – Being productive

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 28 Sep 2012

Welcome to this week's Friday with Filip!

Earlier this week I wrote about how to organize your thoughts by using tools such as Evernote and XMind. Both of these are very easy to work with but are somewhat limited to getting your thoughts into a persistent format. Since productivity is important to all of us, I wanted to spend this Friday on exploring more tools that can be of great use to primarily developers. We live in an era where everything needs to be done as quickly as possible, with the highest quality and costs as little as possible. This can pose as a problem in many cases because they don't quite fit that well together. [...]

Let's write better software

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 27 Sep 2012

Bugs are an expectation instead of an exception

Technology have been a big part of my life ever since I was a kid. If it wasn't a console it was a computer and later came the mobile phone. All these things running on electricity have always interested me. My first mobile phone was a Nokia 5110, which is the only phone that actually never broke.There's a joke around the net that the old Nokia phones never broke and that's very true; however they didn't do much more than calls, sms and snake.

When the phones with color displays appeared the mobile vendors noticed that people wanted to switch phones often; as soon as a new feature was released everyone had to have it. The vendors immediately started pushing out more and more phones, a lot more phones than were actually needed on the market. With this overwhelming amount of mobile phones and rapid development came a lot of more bugs. [...]

Organize your thoughts

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 25 Sep 2012

Do you get a lot of ideas when you go to bed, that you forget in the morning?

I sure do and I know that this is very common. The reason that I've got explained to me is that because when we go to bed, we relax our entire body & mind. When doing so we also start reflecting upon the day or even week that has passed so far; subconsciously.

At least for me, seconds before I actually fall asleep (last thing that I can remember) I get the best ideas but often I lack things around me to get these thoughts on permanent record. [...]

What's the difference between doing this and that in C#?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 24 Sep 2012

I often get the questions or enter discussions where the topic is: What is the difference between doing this and that in C#? It is not always that easy spotting the difference between code samples. I'm not referring to the actual code you have in Visual Studio, but the code that will be executed, or the IL produced when you compile. Most recently I answered a question on StackOverflow that asked if there would be any difference between nesting and not nesting (using AND) if-statements. [...]

Self-publishing a book – Part 3 – Using a good typesetting system

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 23 Sep 2012

This is the third part of the blog series "Self-publishing a book" if you haven’t already check out Part 1 & Part 2.

Word was acting up, I spent too much time trying to work around it and less time on the content — this was not going to work. I decided to drop Word. But for what and how would it make anything easier when all CreateSpace supplied was a Word template?

Do you care about web security?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 21 Sep 2012

I was once put in a project where a lot of the architecture and development was already in place. Immediately when I started working with the project I gave the other team members my thoughts on improvements, some of them regarding testing and some of the regarding security. Last week we focused on the testing, so this week, let us talk a little bit about security. [...]

Avoid shooting yourself in the foot with Tasks and Async

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 20 Sep 2012

Since the release of .NET 4.5, you've been able to use the RTM version of Async & Await. There are some things though that can lead to very weird behaviors in your applications, and a lot of confusion. Kevin (Pilchie) over at Microsoft just gave me heads up on some of these and I thought that I would share it with the rest of you! [...]

I'm going to BUILD, are you?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 19 Sep 2012

I'm happy to finally be able to say that I will be going to BUILD 2012! Thanks to my employer Star Republic, I will be able to attend this amazing event. During the event I will be blogging and tweeting as much as possible. Of course, there will be tons for stuff to blog about even after the event, so stay tuned for all these cool new things that will hopefully be announced at BUILD 2012! [...]

Things in C# you might have missed

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 18 Sep 2012

A while back I did a short programming quiz on my blog and a lot of you responded to each question with interesting ways to solve those puzzles. Here is a list with those questions among other interesting things that you might now have used in your day-to-day development. [...]

Roslyn CTP 3 released -- breaking changes

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 17 Sep 2012

Microsoft has released yet another CTP version of Roslyn and this doesn't come as a big surprise. Since the previous CTP (CTP2) does not work very well with Visul Studio 2012. Now with Roslyn CTP3, we have Visual Studio 2012 support! However, this upgrade does come with a price, there are some breaking changes in the third version of the Roslyn CTP. [...]

Use LINQPad for more than LINQ

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 17 Sep 2012

I like to spend time on StackOverflow and contribute by answering as many questions as I have time to. Many of the questions consist of code that doesn't always work as expected. In these times I find that LINQPad is the perfect tool to use when you want to run the sample code or create smaller samples yourself for your answers.

[...]

Would you attend my online training?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 15 Sep 2012

I really enjoy sharing my experience and knowledge with others and I've been considering creating more screencasts. But as an alternative to screencasts, I am considering doing online-training with something like GoToTraining instead. This will allow higher quality, interactive sessions and much more. [...]

Friday with Filip - Do you use a decent testing strategy?

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 14 Sep 2012

Welcome to Friday with Filip!

Wow, am I excited or what! I was out on a "developer lunch" in Gothenburg with some very nice people and we started talking about blogging, teaching and other fun stuff like that. We started discussing how I usually have what we call "CodeStar" at work; each Friday I teach my co-workers about something exciting for an hour or two. I'm not Always the guy doing the presentations, but mostly. [...]

Visual Studio 2012 is now released to the public

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 13 Sep 2012

On September 12, 2012, Visual Studio 2012 was released to the public and Microsoft of course had a very nice release event. As I couldn't attend in person (it's a 14 hour flight from where I live to Seattle) I as many others watched the live-stream from VisualStudioLaunch.com. [...]

Self-publishing a book – Part 2 – Back at Square One

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 02 Sep 2012

This is the second part of the blog series "Self-publishing a book" if you haven't already check out Part 1.

I was back to square one, with only my raw material. But the hope was not gone, I now had a goal; I am going to publish a book -- but how?

Self-publishing a book - Part 1 - Where it all began

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 27 Aug 2012

What's this blog series going to be about?

It might not have been clear to everyone that my book C# Smorgasbord was self-published. In short self-publish means that I did not have a publisher that backed me up when writing this book.

But if I don't have a publisher how do I get my book printed? How did I get the book up on Amazon? How do I market my book? [...]

The winner(s) are....

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 26 Aug 2012

Congratulations to the winners!

It was so hard to decide just one winner, so I decided that I will give away 5 books to those that gave me the best reason to! [...]

Win a copy of C# Smorgasbord!

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 14 Aug 2012

C# Smorgasbord is getting great reviews, specially on Amazon UK and to celebrate this I want to give a away a free copy of C# Smorgasbord! [...]

C# Smorgasbord

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 10 Aug 2012

As mentioned in my previous post "C# Smorgasbord will soon be available!" I have been working on a C# programming book.

I am now happy to announce that this book is published and available on CreateSpace and Amazon.com!

Grab a copy and let me know what you think! [...]

C# Smorgasbord will soon be available!

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 21 Jul 2012

UPDATE: C# Smorgasbord is now available!

Since the fall 2011 I have been working on a book called C# Smorgasbord. The book is inspired by all the interesting topics that I've touched in this blog.

I'm proud to announce that the book will soon be available for purchase on Amazon and CreateSpace! You will also be able to purchase digital copies on the website for C# Smorgasbord. [...]

Roslyn CTP v2 Released

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 05 Jun 2012

You can now download and install a new version of the Roslyn CTP. The Roslyn CTP is now compatible with Visual Studio 2012 RC for this you will need to download and install Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 RC SDK! [...]