I recently pointed out to a (rather drunk) friend that successful processes are easier to follow than not follow.  He remarked that I could usefully spend a career on the direct consequences of that statement.  It occurred to me that, rather than give up code forever, I might usefully note down some of my thoughts on the subject.  A note: I've been both a chief and an indian in various organizations, and have moved between the two roles more than once.  This has given me a certain perspective on processes, both why they are important, and why they are a...

In the previous post, I dealt with the standard .NET config file.  It would be lovely if all we needed to deal with was appsettings and connection strings.  Sadly, the world is more complex than that.  Now, quite a few of the systems listed below (pretty much all of the XML-based ones) give you the option of including their config in the app.config or in a separate file.  I can't say as I see it makes a blind bit of difference.  Each of them has their own XML schema and I doubt you wish to write a diff tool for...

It's amazing how much engineering time is spent on arguing about the difference in abstraction strategies, followed by someone saying "just copy the files up, but make sure not to touch the config".  This is a recipe for disaster.  There are three common failure scenarios: Someone takes a copy of the live system, runs some tests and accidentally enters the test data into the live system.  I once saw that happen with a stress test.  It wasn't funny.  (In fairness, it's pretty funny in retrospect.) Someone uploads a debug environment, rendering the live system unstable.  (This is mostly...

No really, what's actually on your server?  If you're first answer isn't "erm" you're either very good or don't understand the question.  Servers are huge, they can store War and Peace on their hard drives without you even noticing.  For that matter, they can store any number of PDFs of books on patterns and practices without any appreciable benefit to civilization, but I don't think that's really the fault of the servers.  It's practically impossible to really know what's on there.  What's worse, the way most people do development, they make the job harder for themselves. I had a meeting with...