My thoughts on the Global Day of Coderetreat

Last weekend I attended the Global Day of Coderetreat in Dallas, TX which was not only my first Coderetreat but also my first time attending a developer community event and I have to say that it was a great and worthwhile experience. If you鈥檙e unfamiliar with the format of a Coderetreat you can read all about it at coderetreat.com but its basically a code kata where you spend most of the day pairing up in 45 min sessions and attempt to solve Conway鈥檚 Game of Life (a fascinating problem by itself)....

December 9, 2011 路 3 min 路 Brandon Pugh

Getting started with PetaPoco and Postgres

I鈥檓 currently working on a project I鈥檝e inherited that uses a Postgres sql backend and I was looking for an easy way to make writing our data access layer less time consuming and painful. My first thought was to use a micro-ORM like Massive but while I鈥檝e heard some really great things about Massive, I felt it might be a tough sell to my team members who aren鈥檛 too comfortable with Expandos and its dynamic nature (I know, but change in baby steps I suppose)....

November 30, 2011 路 2 min 路 Brandon Pugh

GhostDoc [Dev tool of the week]

Thought I would try to make it a thing where I post about a particular tool I鈥檓 using that makes life easier for me as a developer. GhostDoc is a cool little Visual Studio plugin that makes commenting your methods and properties much easier. With a keyboard shortcut or right clicking on a method name, GhostDoc will automatically generate xml documentation comments by intelligently looking at the method name and parameters:...

October 19, 2011 路 1 min 路 Brandon Pugh

Allow pasting multiple lines in IE textbox

You may have noticed before that if you try to paste more than one line of text into a textbox in Internet explorer it will on only paste in the first line and disregard the rest. Firefox and Chrome on the other hand will automatically paste all lines of the text onto the one line of the textbox. This issue came up in one of the projects I鈥檓 currently working on where we wanted users to be able to paste in a list of ID numbers they wanted to run a search on....

October 12, 2011 路 3 min 路 Brandon Pugh

VsVim [Visual Studio extension showcase]

I thought I might do an occasional series of posts on useful visual studio extensions that I use and I鈥檓 starting off with one of my must-haves: VsVim. Vim, for those of you who don鈥檛, is a powerful command line based text editor that has been around for a long time. I had to learn it when I was a freshman at college and we had to compile our C++ programs on a central Unix server over SSH and I鈥檝e been hooked ever since....

October 9, 2011 路 1 min 路 Brandon Pugh