Recently I have been working on quite a big website. From the very beginning I knew I would need data caching layer or something that will smartly do it. The simplest solution is just to check if something is in cache in my method code and take it from there. Well, but what if I have 100 methods? Should I call the same logic in all of them? This is only one method call, but still 100 times, makes me feel “this is not the smartest way to do it”. Fortunately I have found out a new approach to make my caching very robust and smart. It is called Aspect Oriented Programming. By using it I have reduced the amount of my code significantly.

Imagine you have an appointment. It’s a blind date. Can you remember such a moment?

You arrive at the agreed time at the agreed place. You look for that folded news paper or red flower.

Then you notice your date. What is the first thing you check?

Be honest what do you do when he or she is not what you were looking for? I know some friends who told me they just walked a way. Some of them fortunately sent an sms message that they wouldn’t manage.

photo credit: eflon

We are facing the same issue when people are visiting our website. Within a split second, to be honest about 4 up to 10 seconds, most people decide what they do, stay or go. But if they go in general they don’t send an sms.

The burning question is of course how to make them stay? The answer is easy: seduce them!

If you have just started a software developer’s career or changed a workplace these tips may comae in handy while establishing yourself in a new environment. It’s not easy to earn colleagues’ respect and reach the “core” of the company. Many fresh graduate developers fail at the very beginning for a variety of different reasons. I already presented a few tips on how to succeed in a new workplace in my previous post. Below you can read more tips that may help you survive in a new job.

Picture credits: stock.xchng

The biggest challenge in software projects, in my opinion, is defining the client’s needs. This might sound like an easy job, but if you don’t do it on a daily basis it will be a hard one. Just try to describe your preferred car to someone. Are you sure you are going to get the car of your dreams? I wouldn’t be too sure.

Describing business requirements that have to be converted into a well tested code is even more challenging. Fortunately, many tools are available to support this process. A method that is gaining more and more market attention is Behaviour Driven Development. We start to fall in love with it as well.

Are you starting your developer’s career? You stand 50% chance of losing this job within the first two years, the study revealed. Surprisingly, many great and talented people fail. I can imagine that after so many years of studying you don’t feel like getting fired. More importantly, it’s becoming the place you start spending 1/3 of your life at. You try to make yourself comfortable here and make other people feel the same with you around. How to settle yourself smoothly into the job? How to win colleagues’ respect?

Have you ever thought about CSS like about a simple programming language with simple syntax. Long hours of hard work suddenly disappear. Instead of writing many lines of code you can use a simple loop or easily define the whole layout grid.

Yesterday, on November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft  released a new version of Silverlight Beta 4. Truly, I am astonished by the amount of features they delivered this time. We are coming closer and closer to the moment when web applications will work like regular desktop versions without portability issues and others. I have listed ten of the most interesting new features.

Seesmic desktop based on Adobe Air used to be one of my favorite Twitter clients up to the moment that FleetDeck desktop arrived. Seesmic had too many performance issues, Tweets were missing. Today I received the announcement of the Preview Version of Seesmic for Windows which made me very curious again. The first impression looks promising.

We get many requests to increase website PageRanks and to make websites search engine friendly. In many cases I really don’t understand what people are bothering about. Why would a rather locally oriented company be willing to spend a fortune for a high PageRank on keywords that nobody is going to use? To be honest I think too many companies are wasting too much money on an issue that will never pay-off. Please check the conversion rate on your website first before you start thinking about spending any money on SEO and PageRank improvements.

Recently, I have been developing quite a big website using ASP.Net MVC Preview 2 framework. Itself it has several nice features but to build a high testable, loosely coupled application we need something more than we get. MvcContrib is a good source of a few nice ideas which can help you in testing, designing and developing your application.