About Me
Hi, I'm Simon Whittemore, a developer living in London. I've been a Developer for about 14 years, and have been working with .NET and C# since version 1.0. I have extensive experience developing maintainable, well architected Web and Desktop Applications in the Financial and IT Services industries, and have successfully integrated Open Source .NET applications and frameworks into processes and software.
Author Archives: simon
Getting familiar with a new code base
Last week, I was looking at the code for a project. I was unfamiliar with the domain, some of the frameworks it utilised, and its architecture. In addition to this, the project documentation is extremely limited or out of date, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on Getting familiar with a new code base
Copy spreadsheet as values
Mmmm, a VBA post. Hopefully there won’t be too many of these. Our system has an excel interface, and many models are built on top of this interface. The issue with this is that when the spreadsheet opens, it will … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on Copy spreadsheet as values
Generate a Patch with Mercurial
This is more of a note to myself so I remember the next time I need to do it, but perhaps somebody will find this useful. If you are generating a patch file for a Mercurial project, it appears that … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on Generate a Patch with Mercurial
Making the tedious exciting – Automapper
If you take it as a given truth, that you do not want your presentation layers to be exposed to Domain Objects directly, then you need some way of “mapping” them to a Presentation Model/DTO structure. Developers hate writing this … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on Making the tedious exciting – Automapper
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DVCS
Frankly, I have been a touch cynical about the love shown in the .Net community for Git and Mercurial. Sure, I thought, they might be better than Subversion, but how much better could they be? Surely, this was just effort … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged dvcs, git, source control
Comments Off on How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DVCS
Compiling Objective-C on Windows via Command Line
I’ve been tinkering with Objective-C for a few weeks on my Mac laptop. I wanted to find out if it is possible to compile on Windows for when I don’t have access to a Mac. I just wanted to be … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Objective-C
Comments Off on Compiling Objective-C on Windows via Command Line
What to Log?
People keep coming up to me at Christmas parties and asking me what I log in my applications. And I tell them: All unhandled exceptions, via an Application-wide exception handler Performance data for certain critical areas of the app In … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Comments Off on What to Log?
Asynchronous Ado.Net Log4Net Appender
As I mentioned in my last post, the out of the box AdoNetAppender in Log4Net is a synchronous appender. This may be fine for many scenarios, but in cases where you have some latency between your application and your database … Continue reading
Centralised Application logging via Log4Net
Logging is now an essential part of any serious application. It is crucial to get unhandled exceptions from production and development environments logged. This removes the necessity for users to provide error messages, and allows the developers to have access … Continue reading
Everything I know about building a responsive Windows Forms application
The more I read about multi-threading, the less I feel I understand. Perhaps a good rule is don’t write multi-threaded code, similar to the first law of Distributed Objects. Fortunately, all I am going to talk about in this article … Continue reading
Posted in UI, Windows Forms
Comments Off on Everything I know about building a responsive Windows Forms application