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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Recently, I’ve been dogged by a Subversion issue (and generally dogged by Subversion — Mercurial and Git are my new friends) that stumped me on and off for a few weeks. The dreaded error was a “Checksum mismatch”. Essentially, the file downloaded from the server didn’t have the content expected. It had been modified.

For those interested, the post that finally led to the fix is here:

http://subversion.open.collab.net/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=3&dsMessageId=450635&orderBy=createDate&orderType=desc

The cause of the problem was that to the web server that served the files had stripping out “non-essential” content from HTML and JavaScript files, namely comments. For end users, that’s great. Less bytes to download? Awesome, we saved an e-tree! But for a developer working on...

There is an (admittedly small) upside to working on something in small bursts. While there is a huge cost to task switching, a regularly scheduled task that doesn’t last long can be productive. Here’s how:

If the task has a relatively low switching cost — something you know well, or something that doesn’t take long to get setup/back into — the time in between sessions gives you time to think (if only unintentionally) about the task, and the upcoming session. Occasionally, you’ll find that you’ll be surprisingly efficient at that task, having had some time to think about things in interim.

Even if you only have a small amount of time, it can be efficient, on the right task.

Maybe this is well-known to the JavaScript coding community — below is a simple technique I’ve found that runs a block of JavaScript when subscribed events stop firing. Full disclosure, I stole this from Hugoware. If he stole it from someone else… ;)

Use Case

A user is entering text into a text box. The user stops typing for a period of time, tabs or clicks out of the text box, or is otherwise done using the text box. When the user is done, server side validation is done (such as checking for uniqueness of a username on a sign-up form).

Solution

Attach a set of events to the text box that capture when the user is making a change, or leaving the text box. Every time the event fires, create a function that contains the functionality you want, to be fired on a timeout. If the event is...