Rizwan's Blog -Developer's hangout!

Tomb stoning is  the process of saving the data and state of your application when it’s terminated such that it can resume where it left off when it is started back up again. There are many cases where you application may be suddenly terminated on the phone. Examples include incoming phone calls or activation of the camera on the device. Tomb stoning is an essential feature that almost every application should support to avoid customer frustration with your application. Tomb stoning an application is fairly straightforward. Every application on the phone has its own permanent storage space on the device that is referred to as isolated storage. Classes for isolated storage can be found in under the System.IO.IsolatedStorage namespace. You can use these classes to store and reload the state and data for your application. In your App.xaml file, the events you should monitor for are the following: Application_Launching – Code to execute when the application is launching. This c...

I just attended Test-Driven Development presentation which represents everything that is wrong about the way Agile advocates are trying to evangelize their practices.  I don’t have anything against the presenter in particular, but it’s really time for Agilists to rethink the way they communicate with the real world. Here are a few comments on his presentation. One of the first slides that deeply troubled me claimed the following: Tests are (executable) specs. If it’s not testable, it’s useless. First of all, tests are not specs.  Not even close.  Somebody in the audience was quick to give a counter-example to this absurd claim by using a numeric example ("how do you specify an exponentiation function with a test?") but my objection to this claim is much broader than that.  Relying on tests as a design specification is lazy and unprofessional because you are only testing a very small portion of the solution space of your application (and of course, your...

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know? 1.Caffeine – You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. Mine is black coffee, early and often. Others may prefer diet soda throughout the day. There are always the classics as well, Mountain Dew and Jolt. 2.Logic – As a programmer, you deal with logic constantly. Your true mettle will be defined by how you deal with the insanity (real or perceived) of the customer. The customer could be your project manager, the business analyst or the users. For any given project, you can count on someone sounding completely insane. 3.Hours – Expect to be working a lot of them. Program...