Peter Gfader 's Blog

Avoid boolean parameters in method parameters

*Updated* 12/07/2010: Response from Uncle Bob added at the end

Uncle Bob has a coding rule: Avoid boolean parameters in method parameters

He preaches that up and down the street, and I couldn't agree more with that!

The reason:

We all know that 1 method should do only 1 thing (Single Responsibility Principle for methods and classes)
If your method has a boolean parameter it is highly possible that your method is doing 2 things

VS2010 - Pro Power Tools - Highlight the selected tab in the document well

If you are using Visual Studio 2010 and you don't have downloaded the Pro Power Tools, then do it now!
One awesome feature of that extension is the Document Well Plus, that gives you nice coloring of tab pages.
1 problem though… see below

Figure: VS2010 - Document well - Which one is the current selected tab?

Performance interview with LoadStorm

The company LoadStorm from Colorado U.S. did an interview with me about web performance and web testing.

I completely forgot to mention that here… so here is the link Peter Gfader
http://loadstorm.com/2010/performance-testing-interview-peter-gfader

LoadStorm provides load testing from the cloud. Never saw such a nice and easy way (and UI) to hit your web servers VERY hard.
Only downside so far: No Silverlight runner … yet…

Additionally a couple of links to check the inner workings of your system...

How to reduce the size of a Silverlight application?

We are using the WrapPanel from the Silverlight toolkit

Because we don't need the whole toolkit assembly, we copy/paste the source of the WrapPanel and use that.
Instead of the whole full blown assembly

Should be fine with the license: Ms-PL

Figure: Size of Silverlight toolkit assemblies

Customer Support in Silverlight

Imagine the following

You have built the world's best Silverlight twitter client, but every now and then your app crashes
OR
You deployed your great Line Of Business Silverlight application, but you have no idea if people like it or not
OR
Every now and then you get a phone call from your customer: "I cant see the details"

So what do you do?

Instead of having endless support calls, email conversations, tracing in log files, lookups in log-databases etc… use the below Feedback Control

Silverlight usability – the context menu

My question to you (developers & designers) about the context menu in Silverlight:

Is an application more user friendly, if there are no functions hidden in the context menu?

What do you think?

Note
To get a context menu before Silverlight 4 you had to set the Silverlight app to windowless and do some weird hacks (UGLY and performance issues!).
With Silverlight 4 we have a context menu out of the box (MSDN Silverlight Whitepaper).

NB (Nota bene, the italian note)
There is no out-of-the-box context menu on the iPad.

I really like the UX of the iPad, but there are some inconsistencies left. Read more here from these usability experts (german article)