Balsamiq Mockups Tool As part of a project that I’m currently managing and developing, I was in a need to design UI mockup for a sample web application. I didn’t want to use Visio or Word for this task since I think that it is an overkill to use such “monsters” for a simple (but very important) task. So I remembered Scott Mitchell’s MSDN Magazine article and his recommendation for the Balsamiq Mockups tool.   After I read the article last year, I evaluated the tool in the online demo and it...

.NET Reflector is Becoming a Paid-For Product Red Gate announced a few days ago that .NET Reflector will become a commercial product from the end of February 2011. Here is what Neil Davidson, Red Gate’s Co-CEO, wrote as an open letter to the .NET community: ”Red Gate has announced that it will charge $35 for version 7 of .NET Reflector upon its release in early March. Version 7 will be sold as a perpetual license, with no time bomb or forced updates. As many of you know, our original intention was...

Book Review – Entity Framework 4 In Action I spent some time lately to read the book “Entity Framework 4 in Action” which was written by several authors – Stefano Mostarda, Marco De Sanctis and Daniele Bochicchio. This book was sent to me by Manning Publications as part of the Manning Early Access Program ( MEAP ). What You are Going to Gain from The Book? The book is all about Entity Framework 4. The authors don’t assume that you are familiar with the technology and they take you to an Entity Framework...

Finding Good Client Web Developers is Hard Today I had a meeting at a customer. One of the things that we talked about was the difficulty in finding good web developers. To be more accurate, the difficulty in finding good client web developers! Since I have lots of experience in interviewing candidates, I really understand that guy's problem. He published his company’s job requirements and seek for an experienced client web developer and all the candidates that he interviewed so far didn’t know...

Book Review – HTML5: Up and Running In the last two weeks I read the book “HTML5: Up and Running” that was written by Mark Pilgrim. Since I’m and always was a web guy I always like to read about the things to come and HTML5 is a specification that is heading our way very fast. What You are Going to Gain from The Book? The book is about HTML5 which is a specification that is being written in these days and will be the de facto standard in the next years. Since reading all the specifications would...

Improving Your Developer Skills I’ve been asked twice this week by two different colleagues from where to start in order to improve yourself as a developer. This question is very tricky and probably you’ll hear a different answer from every person you ask it. Also, in reality the “recipes” you get won’t necessary work for every person but they can be guidelines for improvement. This is a short version of my recipe and what I told my colleagues. Read Books This is an important thing to do when you...

Recommended Post - Black Jack Using Scrum Yesterday, Shai Raiten, a colleague and a friend of mine, published a very original and funny post that describes a custom strategy of wining in “Black Jack” game based on Scrum Methodology . If you didn't read the post I'm recommending you to do so. Here is the link for the post - " Black Jack Using Scrum – Winner Winner Chicken Dinner ". Enjoy!

EFProf – Profiler Tool for Entity Framework One of the important tools in your tool arsenal when you develop with an ORM tool is a profiler. Like SQL profiler to a SQL Server DBA an Entity Framework profiler is a must have tool to Entity Framework developer. The main reasons to acquire such a tool are to understand what is going on underneath the hood in the query engine and for performance tuning. If you think that you can use Entity Framework without knowing what it is committing to database then...

The Need for Source Control Last week I’ve been at a customer.  The problem – non responsive UI since all the application run on the UI thread. So I took a look at the code and… I don’t like to tell about the horrible code I saw but to share a very painful problem I have seen. Even though source control systems are very common, there are customers that can make you “shout” at them when you come to a consulting session. In this customer controlling your sources in a repository tool like TFS,...

MIX10 – Summary Home sweet home! I arrived today back to Israel after a trip of six days to the MIX10 conference (three days conference and almost three days “on the roads”). To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed from the conference. I’ve expected more relevant information and less recycling of things that I already know. As you know (if you followed the MIX10 ), there were announcements about Windows Phone 7 , Silverlight 4 , OData protocol, IE9 and more. After being at the conference and...