.NET Answers

My list of “Must Have Books” would not be complete without a copy of “Rapid Development” by Steve McConnell.

To be honest this is more of a Manager’s book than a Programmer’s book, but I still advise programmers to get a copy and read it.  Why?  Well for one thing, most of your managers won’t bother.  So the only way they are going to get this information is if you read it and tell them.

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A couple of days ago I ran into a requirement to conditionally display footnote information at the bottom of a GridView display.  We were already conditionally displaying icons in the row.  What we needed to do was to conditionally show text at the bottom of the screen that explained what each icon was for.  Here’s how we went about it.

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Or, at least, it didn’t. Here’s what happened:

Yesterday a client asked me to help track down a problem he was having with setting the default button for a text box.

As you should already know, you can make ASP.NET automatically click a specific button on the page (Button, ImageButton, or LinkButton) by grouping everything in a Panel and setting the DefaultButton property to the ID of the button you want to have automatically clicked.

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Want to be the absolute best programmer in your office?  Then get a copy of Code Complete by Steve McConnell, read about three pages, find something you are doing wrong, spend a couple of months fixing that problem and then come back and read three more pages.

You can’t rush this book.

Well, I suppose you could rush it, but if you do it won’t do you much good.  That would be a lot like looking in a mirror and then walking away.  You look in a mirror to see if there is something you need to fix and then you (hopefully) spend time fixing it.

Code Complete is the mirror for programmers:

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UML needs fixing claims founder - Strategy - Development Process - Builder AU

Fixing?  It needs to be shot!

OK.. maybe that’s a bit strong.  But, the problem with UML is that it has tried to abstract all of the various languages and ways of programming into symbols and pictures.

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