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.

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...

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…

I was fortunate enough to receive MSDN Ultimate Subscriptions as well as SQLDenis. I Think Denis's idea and contest to see who we can give these to is excellent. To support Denis and his idea, I'm adding another subscription that will be handed over once we read over the responses. That means your chances just got much better to enjoy the subscriptions and the benefits Visual Studio 2010 has to offer!

I went to a local MS launch event for Visual Studio today, mainly to see what was new with Team Foundation Server, but what really impressed me was some of the new architecture tools they've added. I admittedly haven't read too much about this before today (my needs have been well-served by NDepend) but I'm happy to see some improved architecture tools find their way into Visual Studio. Looking at the version comparison chart, it appears this is only available in ...