One of the tricks I picked up from my last job (and our forum software, now that I think of it) is the idea of user emulation. I could log into the application, search for a user, and, at the push of a button, temporarily become that user. The only differences between emulating them and actually logging in as them were a black bar that indicated who I am (with a link to stop emulating), all audit records continued to reflect my own user id, and I didn't need to keep track of 30 different sample accounts and passwords.

Over my years in (and before) IT, I've seen long projects, failed projects, confused projects, wildly successful projects, and even fun projects that ended far differently than we expected. The consistent take-away for me is that I am a big picture type of person, and that understanding that big, abstract picture cuts out a lot of wasted time sprinting down the wrong paths.

For the last few months I've had the pleasure of working with NDepend version 3. Most of my development at home is on linux these days, so I haven't used it as much as I'd like, but I have been using it to poke around in various codebases and see what the new Visual Studio integration is all about. The last version integrated with Visual Studio, technically speaking, but it didn't seem nearly as thorough as what I've seen in version 3. I suspect the improved extensibility model in VS 2010 has a lot to do with this, but can't confirm (I haven't tried it w...

I was looking at the stack they used for the new channel9 website.

MVC 2.0, Unity (from P&P), NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, Memcached, Enyim Managed Memcached driver, Azure – Fabric, Storage, Diagnostics, SQL Azure, xUnit (testing only), Live ID, Spark View Engine, Akismet (spam filtering service), AntiXSS, Tinymce, jQuery, and Silverlight.

You can watch the video by Mike Sampson on how they built the new site if you want to know more.

But have you co...

Model-View-Presenter is an architecture pattern that defines a structure for behavior and logic at the UI level. M-V-P separates the logic of the presentation, such as interacting with back-end services and the business layer, from the mechanics of disp…