Code Obsession

Cheese Pairing for this Post: 1-year-old, Cave-Aged Gruyere [this is a great one that you can really enjoy every once in a while under the right circumstances] So, this week a user story was assigned to me that said something like, "Make sure that we don't save and of the Order data if we can't save ALL the Order data." Immediately, I thought, "Sounds like time to add some transactional support to our (custom) repositories." So there I am adding some tests to the repositories solution that assert that I have some infrastructure in place to track all of the database connections, etc, when one of my co-workers says, "Why don't you just use TransactionScope?" This was new to me, so here is what I learned: TransactionScope is a class built on the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator. It basically wraps up all that hard work of tracking and committing or rolling back transactions across multiple connections into an easy to use interfac...

OK, now that that is out of the way, lets talk about code. I work in C# using Visual Studio.NET 2008 w/ ReSharper . After working with ReSharper for the last year, I honestly can't imagine working without it, hence the inclusion as part of my IDE. Why don't I throw some buzzwords at you and then try to justify them: DDD , TDD, Agile, XP, IoC, RhinoMocks , nUnit, WatiN, Patterns, Patterns, Patterns... The list could go on. Years ago, I would have defined myself (as a coder) using the names of technologies (XML, HTML, T-SQL). Now I talk more about tools and methods than technologies. I mostly work in ASP.NET targeting the .NET 3.5 framework these days at work, though at home, in my free time, I tend to be more desktop focused. Well, this isn't a resume, now is it? I should just talk about the things that really interest me...

I work in a shop that practices paired programming on all production code. While I quite enjoy this style and encourage it, I occasionally feel the need to check out from the team and get into a coding zone of my own. I find that heavy metal and punk rock help set up the correct mood for me fairly well. Here is the Pandora station I generally listen to: Code Machine .