I recently came home from a busy day of work to my wife blaming me for allowing our 18 month old son to reach some paint and get it all over the carpet. She was concentrating on the fact that he could reach the paint not on the fact that she had brilliantly got the paint out of the carpet. My instinct on being blamed...

I am trying to understand interfaces and when to use them in my code. An interface defines a contract and any class that implements that interface agrees to fulfil that contract. Lets look at an example as this tends to be how I learn best. Most applications require some sort of data to work from so lets start by...

This week I have been looking at improving my understanding of a few programming terms, like SOLID and I will try and define them so I can look back here when I get confused. MVC I have previously blogged about MVC , but my understanding was not 100% correct so I will refine this here. Model – Now this is where my...

A few weeks back I attended a talk at Agile Yorkshire about Test Driven Development or TDD by Dr Oliver Shaw. I was impressed at how easy Oliver made it look, so as I have never tried it I thought I should give it a try. Test Driven Development or TDD is a way of development which starts with writing a Unit Test. First...

As a developer using source control and git is bread and butter of what we do. Github is probably the most popular and widely known hosting service for source control but I have also used Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services. Lets have a look at each one and what they offer. Note while I have included prices I...

Today I spent some time learning the R language. The problem I was trying to solve was to convert local prices of some items into Euros. I had been using a fixed exchange rate for all data, but as exchange rates fluctuate so much this is incorrect. My first though was to find a free API that I could query to get the...

Hello? You have probably like me almost forgotten about this blog. Life has got in the way over the last few months, but lets see if I can restart my blogging habit. In 2017 I want to start a side project for a few reasons. I want to improve my coding skills and look at things I wouldn’t normally during my day job. I...

I am currently working on source code that is over 5Gb in size. This is mostly due to a poorly thought out folder structure, there are code files, images and Excel files all jumbled together. I think a clear distinction should be made between source code and data. Source Code I will define source code as anything that...

So recently I started working on a new codebase. I will be honest when I first saw it, it was a mess. Here are a few of the things I did to try and regain control. I was given access to the source code on Visual Studio Team Services. However this consisted of a single commit 3 months ago. When I looked at what was...

What is LINQ? LINQ is an acronym for Language Integrated Query, which describes where it’s used and what it does. The Language Integrated part means that LINQ is part of programming language syntax. In particular, both C# and VB are languages that ship with .NET and have LINQ capabilities. How do I use LINQ in my C#...