Scott Allen
Scott Allen’s blog features development advice straight from the trenches. Scott shares his experiences, what he tried, what worked, what didn't, and traps to avoid. Alongside architecture and project management-focused blog entries, you'll find more nitty-gritty technical posts about LINQ, JavaScript and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Windows® Workflow, and Silverlight.
OdeToCode | 18 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....Jeremy’s post “Don’t Check In Spike Code” reminds of something I’ve advocated for years: dedicate a place in your source control repository where each developer can check in their “experimental” code. The rule of thumb is to throw away code you..."
Read more » Spike Code and Source Control
OdeToCode | 17 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....There is a lot of humor in the Bad Variable Names entry on the c2 wiki. I like this confession from Alex: The worst of which was my counter variable names. I now use i, j, k, and so on for local counts and things like activeRowCount for the more..."
Read more » Single Letter Variable Names Still Considered Harmful
OdeToCode | 14 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....Once you know about the magic of Expression<T>, it’s hard not to make use of it. Or perhaps, abuse it. Here is an excerpt of a class I wrote that uses Expression<T> as a reflection helper. public class PropertySpecifier<T>
{..."
Read more » Mapping with Expressions
OdeToCode | 13 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....In the last post we talked about needing some Expression<T> background. There is a lot of good information out there about Expression<T>, but if you haven’t heard – this class is pure magic. If you want a long version of the story, see..."
Read more » Expression Magic
OdeToCode | 12 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....In a previous post, I talked about modeling flowcharts with C# code. The flowcharts are designed, documented, and standardized by a non-profit organization charged with measuring the quality of patient care inside of hospitals. They do..."
Read more » Fluent Interfaces and Flowcharts
OdeToCode | 11 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....Tim Mallalieu, PM of LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities, recently announced: “…as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.” Tim later tried to clarify the announcement in a..."
Read more » The Estrangement of LINQ to SQL
OdeToCode | 10 Nov 2008 05:12
Scott Allen writes "....A few months ago I worked on a system that was based on a set specifications that included some gnarly flowcharts (see pages 7 – 17 for an example). The good news was that the specs were concrete and readily available. The bad news was that the..."
Read more » Modeling Flowcharts
OdeToCode | 01 Oct 2008 13:30
Scott Allen writes "....Someone asked me why LINQ operators return an IEnumerable<T> instead of something more useful, like a List<T>. In other words, in the following code:List<Book> books = new List<Book>();
// ...
IEnumerable<Book>..."
Read more » Lazy LINQ and Enumerable Objects
OdeToCode | 03 Sep 2008 04:12
Scott Allen writes "....Mike had to model answers. Yes or no answers, date and time answers - all sorts of answers. One catch was that any answer could be “missing” or could be “empty”. Both values had distinct meanings in the domain. An interface definition fell out of..."
Read more » What’s Wrong With This Code? (#20)
OdeToCode | 02 Sep 2008 06:13
Scott Allen writes "....Over a month ago I did a presentation on LINQ and promised a few people I’d share the code from the session. Better late than never, eh? We warmed up by building our own filtering operator to use in a query. The operator takes an..."
Read more » Stupid LINQ Tricks
