Wikipedia lays out David Premack’s principle in laymen’s terms: Premack's Principle suggests that if a student wants to perform a given activity, the student will perform a less desirable activity to get at the more desirable activity. Many people grow up under a rigorous application of the principle. Parents around the world tell kids to “finish your homework before you play outside”, and “finish your vegetables* before you eat desert”.   Did you ever wonder if the “no pain, no gain” line of thought drilled into us since grade...

Sometimes the simplest solution introduces a bug. Let’s say there is a ListBox in WPF (or Silverlight) displaying bowlers* and their bowling scores: <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Bowlers}" > <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Score}"/> ...

Here are some events I’ll be speaking at over the next couple months: DevTeach Toronto / Mississauga March 8-12. DevTeach stands for Developers Teaching. It’s a conference done by developers for developers. This annual event offers the elements of an international conference and the elements of a community event. Sessions include both presentation material and, whenever possible, hands-on training. We like to describe this event as the Developers Festival. Find out who should attend at this link. Check out the top ten ways to convince your boss to let you go this event. DevTeach is about becoming...

I stumbled across “A vent abount MVVM Development” thanks to a tweet from @peterbromberg. Excerpt: What really irritates me is that I am forced to waste so much time on how to try and figure out how a complex User Interface will work together with a suitable "ViewModel" all for the sake of being more "testable".  I could cobble together a pretty darn good application and still be able to split up the work among User Interface and code-behind developers.  I think adopting a non-industry standard, seemingly "best practices" ideology just because it seems 'cool' and...

Mark Needham’s “Thoughts On Software Development” is a great collection of blog posts. Last year Mark wrote “Coding: The primitive obsession”, and challenged the idea that the primitive obsession anti-pattern is just about overusing low level data types like string and int. The most frequent offender seems to be the creation of collections of things which we then query to find specific items elsewhere in the code. More often that not we'll also perform some custom logic on that particular item. At its most extreme we might extract each of the items...