As I prepared to give a presentation tomorrow night, I stumbled upon a great article explaining how to setup Visual Studio for a “presentation mode.” Presentation Mode are the font sizes required so the folks sitting in the back row don’t repeatedly say “can you zoom in a little?”

I’ve written about presentations before, but failed to go into any detail about configuring your IDE of choice. Mine for tomorrow will be Visual Studio. Since it’s been a while since I’ve presented, I didn’t quite remember the required settings to change the fonts. And Visual Studio has a lot of settings:

Thankfully, I found the article I mentioned above, and saved myself a small fortune of time trying to find and toggle all the correct settings. I’ve perfected the following quick process for my presentations.

4 simple steps to a better presentation

Step 1: Download this Visual Studio settings files

Step 2:...

Playing the game

Like any many fixed systems, the supposedly fair system of user reviews is horribly broken. The process was ripe for gaming. And gamed it has been. Companies optimize their apps and websites to get you to leave reviews. EA, with their Dungeon Keeper on mobile platforms has optimized this to the extreme:

Clicking “5 Stars” take you to the store to give that rating. While clicking “1-4 Stars”…

Emails, as far as I know, don’t show up as app store reviews. Instead, you get ushered away from app store to some back room where no one knows what was said. That, in theory, leads to more reviews and a higher score. EA’s tactic may have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for other issues with the game.

“Beating” the system

Less than satisfied users on the other hand, in response to all the reviews, or perhaps just in anger and spite, leave reviews and scathing comments. “I’d...

I started a new project at work a few months ago. Literally, a new project, as in File -> New Project. It was very liberating (and scary) to not worry about the company’s main code base that was 10+ years old. While in decent shape, nothing that old is going to be without problems. I call those problems technical debt. (You also don’t get all the niceties and helpers that someone else has spent 10 years perfecting, but I digress).

Like any project, my new project started accruing technical debt. I was faced with the decision that every project is: pay back the debt or build shippable (and thus profitable) features. Most projects choose the latter. That’s probably the right decision in some cases. But being scared that one day the new project would be the old project, I couldn’t live with the decisions made weeks earlier. They didn’t sit right with me.

The other developer and I...

Update

Google Authenticator no handles this situation correctly, and this article is less useful than it once was.

Original Article

Microsoft recently added two factor authentication. You should add this to your account. It’s a good thing.

I recently tried on my Android phone to scan the barcode, but it wasn’t working. My co-workers and I figured out that the Google accounts we already had setup on the Android authenticator app shared the same email address. Both Google and Microsoft were using that for their account name, so the second account wasn’t being added.

To get around this, I manually added the account and gave it a name other than my email address. I now have notmyrealemail@gmail.com“ for Google and "Microsoft” for Microsoft.

If you use Visual Studio, you don’t get integration with version control unless you use Team Foundation Server or install a plugin. This is an adaptation of this fantastic guide, originally written for TortoiseSVN. This guide also works for git (or any version control system), just change the commands.

Creating External Tool entries

The first step to setting up the integration is to create external tool entries for the various commands you’d like to launch from Visual Studio. Using the following steps, you’ll have one or more hg commands at your disposal.

1. Go to “Tools -> External Tools” menu item.
2. Click “Add”.
3. Name the tool in the “Title” textbox. I’ve chosen “hg annotate”, “hg diff”, and “hg log”.
4. In the “Command” textbox, put the path to TortoiseHg, typically “C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\thg.exe”
5. Fill out the proper arguments. The $(ItemPath) variable points to the current file....

As browsers become more and more capable, and JavaScript proliferates to all corners of the software development world, it was only a matter of time before we saw the rise of JavaScript game libraries.

A library that caught my eye recently was Crafty. Crafty embraces common JavaScript practices and patterns that not only make HTML5 games simple to write, but a joy to code.

The basics

First, you must define a “viewport” for the game to run in. Crafty supports both the newer <canvas> element, as well a plain old <div> elements for less compliant browsers. To define a viewport, you only need to make a single call:

Crafty.init(600, 400); 

Crafty uses an “Entity Component System”. Basically, each “thing”, be it the player, an enemy, a bullet, a platform, or even the score, is a simple object that has one or more attributes attached to it. Instead of inheriting a bunch of...

I’ve long maintained that the hardest errors to find in a software application are those of omission. Omissions can be many things, but ultimately are missing data that was not noticed or changes in functionality that did not occur. Depending on your application, missing data or functionality can be annoying, costly, or worse.

If it doesn’t happen, it’s not an error, right?

When determining how to test an application, you often test based on what you expect the application to do. It’s a very reasonable approach, right? Given some input A, expect result B. You’re happy and move on. But what about C? It doesn’t always occur – should it have occurred when B occurred? How can you be sure? In fact, there are probably conditions when C should not occur. This just got complicated.

How do you find something that’s not there?

Sometimes the volume of data is overwhelming. Imagine verifying that...

My newest co-worker challenged recruiters to step up their game. He’s found a job he likes (and I’m biased, so I’ll just nod and smile) that provides some of the challenges he is looking for. Perhaps my co-worker attracts a higher quality of recruiter than I, but I’ve not had any luck with unsolicited contact from recruiters.

For most of this year, I’ve had an active disdain for LinkedIn. I’m not in the market for a job, have not indicated I’m looking, and don’t desire to be contacted about new opportunities. And yet, the LinkedIn messages, invites, and contact keeps coming.

Let me interrupt this rant with a self-reality check: I’ve been very fortunate during my career in regards to finding the right job at the right time. I can’t take all the credit. Some will say I’ve been lucky, some will say I’ve been blessed. Both groups are probably right. If my situation was different, and I...

It’s likely that your application doesn’t live in a vacuum by itself. At a minimum, it either sends or receives data to or from another application. More likely, it sends and receives information from multiple sources. You’re app is just a cog in a larger series of cogs, that makes up some grand vision of some master stakeholder or CIO somewhere. You aren’t the most important cog, but without you, or any one cog, none of it works.

Why is it then, that the development team waits until the end of the project to actually interface with these outside systems? The one thing you can’t control are the things that are outside your control. Yet, system after system, app after app, integration is an afterthought, a lower priority. And time after time, the team barely squeaks by or is burned by an external system that can’t move at the speed of your crunch time.

(As an aside, external payment...