Answering the call

One of the feeds in my live.com Tech tab (which is distinct from my Microsoft tab :-) ) is Wintellog, which is an aggregated feed of all the bloggers at Wintellect. I've seen several of these guys speak over the years, mostly at DevWeek - they are all top-notch and I thoroughly recommend seeing them if you get chance.


Yesterday John Robbins wrote something of a call to action: read Code Complete and write a 'book report' on it as a comment in his blog.


Guilty confession time: I've never read it, despite it being on my desk for a number of years. It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm confessing. And I'm undertaking to answer the call: I took it home last night, and I'm going to read it (as soon as I finish the excellent Six Sacred Stones). I'll post my review here as well as on John's blog, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

Pixel8ed Podcast

I listened to Craig Shoemakers' Pixel8ed podcast on debugging with John Robbins yesterday. This isn't a podcast I've come across before, I followed the link from John Robbins' blog. I generally liked it though I found some of the music under the speech a bit distracting.

I've used some of the attributes Craig talks about before - I'm a fan of DebuggerStepthrough for code like property getter/setters where I'm pretty sure they're bulletproof bits of code. I think it's worth noting that you can still set breakpoints in code with DebuggerStepthrough on it and your code will break there if you still need to debug it.

Haven't come across Tess Ferrandez' blog before but it looks like she may well deal with some hardcore ASP.NET debugging situations. I love her Yoda-like 'if it is broken, fix it you should'! Subscribed.

I saw John Robbins speak at DevWeek a few years ago - the man's a legend! I love the concept of a developer who used to be in Special Forces. And it reminds me that I must go back and read some more of his 'Debugging .NET 2.0 Applications'.