Posted on 20 May 2022

.NET StackOverflowException is a special type of exception. Starting with .NET 2.0 you can't catch this kind of exception with a try/catch block. Usually, it is a result of recursive method calls. Your program is out of free memory, and any clean-up does not make sense. Every time the .NET program has started, an instance of StackOverflowException is created "just in case". This way framework can throw it (and terminate itself immediately) even if there is no free memory.

Posted on 04 September 2019

Posted on 04 September 2019

Pair Programming (PP) is one of the XP practices. Many modern software development companies use it in daily activities. On the other side in many places PP is treated as a waste of resources because the same result could be achieved with half of the effort. Software developers also have mixed feelings about this methodology, including me.

Posted on 26 July 2019

To get motivated I need inspiration. Studying about and having The Giants close to me is helpful. This post is about the inspiration I get from them.

Posted on 19 June 2019

I was a true believer in Agile methodology. I was... Now I think Agile, in the current form, does more harm to the project than waterfall did in the past. Let me explain you why.

Posted on 16 June 2019

So you want to change your career :) IT is maybe more lucrative than other industries or just gives more fun! Here are some tips for people want change themselves into programmers.

Posted on 23 May 2019

Time - probably the only resource on the planed that we can get back. We have to choose what we spend our time on, with whom and on what.

Posted on 30 April 2019

For over last couple of years Microsoft has invested a lot of time and effort into artificial intelligence/machine learning ecosystem. Currently the result can be considered as the first choice platform for enterprise solutions. In this article, I will present the key Microsoft AI/ML solutions available for developers currently.

Posted on 10 April 2019

In one of the project in GEMOTIAL we work on an Angular app that will work on mobile devices.

Posted on 04 April 2019

Last week I have attended 2 conferences in Wroclaw. First, there was WROC# and the day after BoilingFrogs.

Posted on 24 March 2019

Last week I have attended the Microsoft MVP Summit event in Redmond, WA. I was there for the second time and don't regret any moment :)

Posted on 10 March 2019

Last week I was involved in moving software solutions from one server farm to another.

Posted on 26 February 2019

This posts describes my online course available From chaos to SOLID.

Posted on 28 January 2019

Last Saturday I had another 'From chaos to SOLID' workshop for C# developers. We meet in EY office in Wroclaw. This time workshop was done under devWarsztaty.pl brand.

Posted on 10 January 2019

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 16 December 2018

I can say another weekend, another workshop :) Azure Bot Framework this time!

Posted on 10 December 2018

I have organized my first free C# refactoring workshop. I called it From CHAOS to SOLID. The main idea of the workshop is to teach how the source code can be transformed in an easy way to be more maintainable and robust.

Posted on 20 November 2018

In one of my previous posts i've introduced Roslynator

Posted on 11 November 2018

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 06 November 2018

BizTalk as an enterprise platform has a lot of modules, components, adapters and other extensions. After developing solutions in BizTalk and maintaining it for a longer period the need for a maintenance tool is becoming important.

Posted on 30 October 2018

Roslynator is a collection of code analyzers, refactorings and code fixes. It is a Roslyn-based equivalent of FxCop. To some extend it is a replacement for Resharper from JetBrains. Of course R# is much more powerfull, bur Roslyntor is also getting more and more traction recently.

Posted on 16 October 2018

In .NET Core the way you specify AssemblyInfo attributes has changed. .NET Core allows you to specify assembly attributes in .csproj. You can do that by adding following properties:

Posted on 08 October 2018

In one of the projects we work at Gemotial it was pretty cumbersome to test feature branches locally. The changes very often could have an impact on MSSQL or Oracle backend. We thought it would be great if we cloud run the changes on our integration tests configuration in Jenkins. Then, use the tests results (a link to it) in merge-request description. That way we could ensure that new functionality does not break the software.

Posted on 29 September 2018

I had the opportunity to attend .NET Developer Days conference also this year. The event was organized in the same place as in previous years - EXPO XXI in Warsaw. Polish capitol looks nice in the autumn, so foreign conference participants had a good opportunity to have some sightseeing too.

Posted on 20 September 2018

My blog always used Wordpress as the blog engine. I remember version 2.6. That was long time ago. During recent years the engine was actively developed by the community. Currently there is version 4.7.

Posted on 04 September 2018

Why there are parks in the cities? Why did city architects decide to keep those green islands?

Posted on 24 August 2018

Recently one of my colleagues asked the following question on Twitter:

Posted on 05 August 2018

I've been programming for over a decade. During that time I went through several pretty difficult scenarios in my programming assignments. I want to share some thoughts in this post.

Posted on 20 June 2018

A few weeks back I've created a survey for developers. The idea was to test my 7 dev types and potentially uncover something new.

Posted on 01 June 2018

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 22 May 2018

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 20 May 2018

For the last few weeks, I have been learning docker. The start with new technologies was, as usual, easy for the basics and fairly difficult for the more advanced stuff. On some stage, I found KataCoda. The service motto is: Learn new technologies using real environments right in your browser.

Posted on 18 March 2018

GeekWeekWro will take place also this year!

Posted on 26 February 2018

I had the opportunity to give the presentation Seven Personality Types of Software Developer twice so far. The presentation is based on my previous post. First of all, the session was surprisingly very interesting for developers. Despite its soft nature, I have received a lot of feedback from the audience during and after the session. The whole idea of categorizing developers by their personality type seems to be hot.

Posted on 31 January 2018

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 09 January 2018

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 21 November 2017

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 16 November 2017

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 01 November 2017

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 06 October 2017

This post is a part of How To Ship Maintainable Product series

Posted on 27 September 2017

This is the first post in a series of How to ship maintainable product

Posted on 10 September 2017

.NET Framework provides several data structures for constant O(1) access. In software engineering we call them lookup tables. In .NET we can list following lookup-tables (at least):

Posted on 07 September 2017

Today I wanted to touch the subject of programming schools.

Posted on 22 August 2017

There are plenty of books about motivation. How to motivate yourself and others. We give ourselves something we like after finishing a difficult task. It can be a chocolate bar or an hour of video gaming. We try to motivate out employees with many benefits: free healthcare, informal Fridays, pizza days, in-house conferences etc. At the beginning it works quite fine, but as we go the effects are weaker and weaker.

Posted on 18 May 2017

Posted on 04 May 2017

This post is also available in Russian language at Softdroid

Posted on 02 May 2017

This is another post about C# basics :)

Posted on 20 April 2017

In C# there are 3 of ways to throw an exception.

Posted on 11 April 2017

NDepend was recently released as VSTS Extension. Before that it was available as separate application. It was (and still is) to run it as task on CI server (eg. TeamCity)

Posted on 03 April 2017

One week. Many geeks. One idea.

Posted on 02 April 2017

In one of my previous posts I briefly described the concept of test message. Today I wanted to explain it in more details. The need of having production system operational is self-explanatory. It is the highest priority in all businesses - be able to operate. Without any doubts regarding software quality. Users need to trust the system.

Posted on 19 March 2017

Post o sesjach jakie miales w marcu

Posted on 05 March 2017

Another great IT conference and second one happening in Wroclaw, Poland. Cool :) The organizers surprised us again few times :)

Posted on 02 March 2017

Maintaining large software systems is hard. Such systems are usually complex by nature. On diagrams they look nice - couple figures exchanging messages each other. The devil is in details - as always. Microservices add extra complexity. We moved from monoliths to farms of services. Now we can deploy changes separately - we decoupled the responsibilities (SOLID rocks!). Now we have more nodes where out messages are flowing from and to.

Posted on 28 February 2017

Last Saturday I've attended Boiling Frogs conference in Wroclaw.

Posted on 07 February 2017

As you may know I'm a big fan of automation. I like to have things done in background and just receive notification if something happens. This saves time and allows me to forget about yet another thing to check situation.

Posted on 02 February 2017

As some of you may know I work with BizTalk. I'm involved in an integration project where ESB Toolkit will be used soon. I'm researching various scenarios at the moment.

Posted on 29 January 2017

"TD" abbreviation for Technical Debt term

Posted on 26 January 2017

This time I'll talk little bit about code best practices. Usually one thing what every development team does at the beginning of the project is to agree on some conventions. We agree to call services in certain way. Give view models ViewModel suffix and so on. During code reviews we try to catch all those kind of issues.... it's annoying and silly to waste time on somethings like that.

Posted on 21 January 2017

For novice BizTalk developers such simple task like creating messages in BizTalk orchestration may become cumbersome. This is what I've learned so far :)

Posted on 19 January 2017

In IT industry we have to learn quite intensive new things. Everything changes, but in our industry, it happens much faster. Today's buzzword is forgotten tomorrow. How do we approach that? 's annoying and silly to waste time on somethings like that.

Posted on 07 January 2017

Technical debt in software development is considered as implementing quick and dirty solutions in order to satisfy user (or deliver a sprint - Sic!). Those solutions should be paid-off in the future.

Posted on 04 January 2017

While working with MSMQ you may want to access Dead-Letter Queues. If your messages are not delivered to the expected destination they usually end up in Dead-Letter Queue.

Posted on 28 December 2016

A while ago I wrote a post about [7 mental types of software developer]. Now it is time to the first adjustment. It turned out that "Code nazi" and "SOLID junkie" are pretty similar. Junkie was merged in to "Code nazi".

Posted on 15 November 2016

Communication between layers/modules/subsystems works best when API is simple and self explanatory. Pieter Hintjens wrote a great article about API design.

Posted on 14 November 2016

As IT community grows every year it is natural that supporting events like conferences, user group or hackathons will appear more often. Developers are attracted by free food and drinks, top speakers or new devices to test.

Posted on 06 November 2016

I'm a big fun of automation. I would even say 'what can be automated, can be forgotten' and you can focus in important things. This post happen to be next in new series called "Automation". The series came out somehow, I didn't plan it. It just seem that there are things I would like to share :)

Posted on 27 October 2016

Quite while ago I had the opportunity to start a project using BizTalk. In one sentence BizTalk is a stable integration platform providing message persistence, mappings, orchestrations and tooling. It's of course not everything :) It has it's pros and cons, but today I will share my thoughts on how to start with BizTalk. All information are based on my own experience developing BizTalk solutions for last 2 years.

Posted on 22 October 2016

In every group of individuals, we can recognize a pattern. Observing and grouping people can give us more understanding of how teams are formed, how they work etc...

Posted on 17 October 2016

Few days ago I decided to release my CodeWatch library. It's the first version to show the concept.

Posted on 13 October 2016

We all suffer from having not enough time. Time to do this or that. I did some research on where is my time spent. My daily (and simplified) activities that could be automated look like following:

Posted on 11 October 2016

In BizTalk orchestration we can catch 2 different types of exceptions:

Posted on 09 October 2016

Learn -> Play -> Work -> Teach

Posted on 30 September 2016

Since 2 years I have the opportunity to work with BizTalk. This post is one of "BizTalk series". I'll keep posting interesting tricks that are easy to do, but not so easy to find on internet.

Posted on 27 September 2016

Working with MSMQ can be hard. Windows does not provide a tool to generated or edit messages on the queue. There are plenty of tools that can do that for you. Especially I like Mqueue Viewer

Posted on 18 August 2016

In daily programming activities some of use have the pleasure to use TDD approach :) Going deeper we can introduce the concept of mocks/stubs/shims. For the sake of this article let's call it mocks. Quite often we use 3rd party libs becuase they offer some functionalities we need. For example:

Posted on 17 August 2016

Posted on 17 August 2016

In the past, there were myths and legends passed between generations. Later Gutenberg introduced printing... the knowledge started to spread across the world rapidly. This day's books are the main sources of transferring knowledge. Open-minded people read a lot. I try to stay open-minded...

Posted on 09 July 2016

For secure communication I suggest contacting me via e-mail using PGP encryption. Below is my public PGP key.

Posted on 05 May 2016

In one of my web application I use MemoryCache to improve performance. The code looks like this:

Posted on 17 April 2016

During my daily work I'm creating an integration system using Microsoft technologies like BizTalk. There is a lot of exciting challenges to meet :) System health monitoring, message archiving and modular structure are just some of them. Apart of that I'm involved in wrocnet.org. Last week our monthly meeting was a part of GeekWeekWro #2 - week of IT events in Wroclaw.

Posted on 05 April 2016

This post will be in polish since it is totally related to polish .NET group on Facebook

Posted on 29 March 2016

Nuget is very good packed manager tool for .NET projects. We all use Nuget to get all necessary dependencies in our project. Usually, our projects are installed in Program Files or inetpub, which is perfectly valid :) Referenced dlls will be installed along with our projects. Everything is great!

Posted on 24 March 2016

On Wednesday I've attended Warsaw IT Days (Warszawskie Dni Informatyki in polish). This time as a speaker :). It took me one year to jump back on stage :). I was giving a talk called "SOLID for Adults" as a part of DevTalk - Deep Dive track.

Posted on 18 March 2016

TL;DR; Write down everything from the meeting :) Day after meeting we remember 20% from it

Posted on 12 March 2016

TL;DR; Objectivity did excellent work with this event focused on delivering world-class value to programmers. Now, dear reader, read the rest :P

Posted on 26 February 2016

WPF + MVVM is a very common way to make windows apps. It introduces the concept of data binding. We create a view-model based on one or many models and bind it to the view. Usually, it is easy... But how do you debug bindings if something is not going right? For example, you have Control Templates and styles and so on introduced in your app.

Posted on 22 February 2016

I like to meet people, discuss things related to programming, new technologies, ideas and so on. I was living in several cities and always wanted to stick to people sharing the same interests. After moving to Wrocław a few years ago I immediately joined WrocNET. At the moment I'm one of the organizers and looking forward to the next meeting :)

Posted on 27 January 2016

Communication is a substantial skill for humans. That applies also to software projects.

Posted on 01 January 2016

Logging information on how our application behaves is very often omitted or not properly handled by developers. We don't know what and when to log. We don't have a logging strategy. In this post, I' share my thoughts on this topic. Let's start with what hurt us when it comes to logging information from our projects.

Posted on 25 November 2015

BuildStuff 2015 LT is over. This conference is another prove that event made be developers and for the developers is a perfect fit. No suits, business cards exchange and other corporate bullshit. Just raw meat :)

Posted on 15 October 2015

It's a while since my last post.... :) Perhaps there was nothing worth writing from my side. Now it is.

Posted on 10 March 2015

Last Saturday I had a presentation about SOLID. Below is the video recording. Unfortunately, the session itself was taken in polish but, at least the slides are in English :)

Posted on 18 January 2015

Almost every software engineer start his career as a junior developer. Sometimes in a corporate environment, sometimes in small software studio etc... Young code hackers are often as good as developers with few years of professional experience. There are several possibilities evolve as a great software engineer in our industry.

Posted on 26 October 2014

Yesterday (25.10.2014) I have attended a local NoSQL Hackathon. The event was hosted by PGS Software. It started at 9:00 and took a bit less then 9 hours to program a sample version if a twitter-like website.

Posted on 16 August 2014

A short while ago I had a task that required generating excel documents (xls) with special OLE objects. Checkboxes, to be precise.

Posted on 20 July 2014

Recently I step upon an issue of compiling a project using Mono. Mono itself comes with a nice tool called xbuild which is a msbuild brother in Mono world. Xbuild can be used to compile a project from the command line.

Posted on 07 July 2014

Last Saturday I have attended Java related conference - Confitura. My main goal was to see IT world from another site. I think that every developer should concentrate not only on his area of expertise but also stay in touch with overall trends. That's why we have nHibernate or Nancy in .NET world - leader of those projects had to know or heard and the original implementation in other languages. It's like "Think global, act local" statement.

Posted on 27 June 2014

Last Wednesday we had our first meeting in regarding .NET Dev PL website project. It was 1,5 hour Skype discussion. I think it went pretty well. We learned a little bit about other team members. It turned out that some of us are experts in front-end technologies, others in SharePoint or in DevOps. I'm happy that the team is a mix of various point of views.

Posted on 24 June 2014

After a brief description in my previous post why .NET Developers Poland group was created now it is time to share some rules that every group member should respect.

Posted on 22 June 2014

Over the last several years I was observing how software engineering communities evolve and grow around the world. People join communities to be stronger, to share knowledge, to search for solutions to their problems or just for fun. At this point, I missed perhaps 100 other reasons, but there is always a purpose. Often the need is to stick with new technologies and similar people. They need a place for that, a habitat...

Posted on 17 December 2013

My third ScreenCast from the Sample refactoring series is already available!

Posted on 02 December 2013

My second ScreenCast from the Sample refactoring series is already available! In polish again.

Posted on 01 December 2013

I want to share with you a ScreenCast I've recorded recently. This is the first of a whole series. The main topic of the series is: Sample refactoring.

Posted on 08 February 2013

I will be shipping new iPhone game soon. It is 2 players, turn-based strategy game. Client-server architecture. More information soon ;) One question that came to my mind recently was: "How to handle app updates ?!". Right now I use simple REST with http links like: /move, /setup, etc.... The potential problem will occur when a new version will require different JSON response from "/move" link. In that situation either version 1 or 2.0 will not work... or I'll have to support both versions under the same link. This does not smell like a good solution. The image below shows the problem.

Posted on 18 December 2012

New year is coming. As usual, in this moment it time I set goals for upcoming year. Having my goals written down keeps me motivated and focused on reaching them.

Posted on 13 December 2012

For all who are looking for good ignore pattern. I use follow one:

Posted on 04 November 2012

IT industry is growing rapidly... software and hardware are continuously improved. The new software works slow on old hardware. We all have faced that problem before :P About two weeks ago I decided to buy a new "sandbox" too :D My first idea was to buy a good notebook, but after deeper research, calculation and thinking I decided to get desktop PC. This choice, as we all know, has pros and cons, but I think desktop PC is that what I need now.

Posted on 09 October 2012

Awesome awesome awesome! This phrase describes DevDay 2012 perfectly! Sessions conducted by Scott Hanselman, Greg Young, Sebastien Lambla, Mark Rendle, Martin Mazur, Rob Ashton and Antek Piechnik at this conference were just amazing! Great balance between technical and non-technical information. I have expected some level but seeing (for example) Scott Hanselman sharing his secrets of sharpening the saw was a nice surprise.

Posted on 27 September 2012

Last Saturday I have attended my first conference in autumn 2012. I have registered for it on dedicated website (mobilization.pl). The website could look a bit more professional. A mix of Polish/English, fonts. Anyway, I was able to find all the important information.

Posted on 05 February 2012

Posted on 27 September 2011

"Some fields should be read-only"... Is this a good description? If you can read in other minds, then it's ok..... otherwise be more precise when submitting a bug report!

Posted on 24 September 2011

WPF provides, fairly easy to implement, possibility to validate entered data and notify user when something is incorrect. An example is available in MSDN, so I will skip further explanation how does this work...

Posted on 18 September 2011

When you fix a bug and you feel that it may occur in the future, don't waste time and write at least one Unit Test to check code against that bug.

Posted on 15 September 2011

This is often daily scenario in programmers work. Work day is about to end, You are in a hurry with finishing coding, just final commit and go home :) Looks natural. Save your work somewhere. Not so fast my friend!

Posted on 15 September 2011

C# language has a great Exception Handling mechanism build-in. If something in not predictable during compile time developer can easily embed that piece of code in try{ (...) } catch{ (...) } and say "case closed". Sample code taken from MSDN:

Posted on 01 June 2011

In .NET world executable files using by default configuration file with special name. Microsoft has implemented following pattern: executable: program.exe and corresponding configuration file program.exe.config. In many scenarios this pattern is fitting well, but there are some cases when something else necessary. In my situation common configuration file was desirable! One configuration file with shared app settings, configuration strings, etc.

Posted on 19 May 2011

Today I've received an email from JetBrains with short information saying that an alternative to ReflectorPro is available! Since Reflector since version 7 will be not free any more I was looking here and there for some alternatives... Few weeks ago I've been looking at ILSpy, but it doesn't fit my needs. I find it little bit hard to use. Today I've started to test dotPeek and I'm pretty impressed with the tool.

Posted on 20 February 2011

On the market there is number of Mockup tools. All of them are providing similar functionality. Some allow import external graphics or exporting to pdf files out of the box. But for my needs all those additional features are not necessary. The most important factor is that the tool should provide standard mock-up functionality and by relatively cheap or freeware ;). That's why I was looking for tool that will meet that criteria:

Posted on 10 February 2011

By default tooltip is hidden when control is disabled. There is simple way to enable it. Code below show how to do that:

Posted on 29 January 2011

Assigning HTML like colors (i.e. #318D38) in WPF application directly in XAML is very easy and smooth. For example code:

Posted on 17 January 2011

SnippetCompiler is another useful tool for C# developers. Is quite similar to FastSharp. Both allow you to write and compile sample code very quickly. SnippetCompiler has IntelliSense support (missing in Fast Sharp), that gives benefits. Unfortunately, last version is from year 2008... supports .NET up to 3.5....

Posted on 16 December 2010

Posted on 14 December 2010

This post is not a hot news, but it may help somebody ;)

Posted on 28 November 2010

Today just a short note. Recently I've been working on a XNA project. In my project I needed to rotate line. I used that calculation:

Posted on 21 November 2010

CLR via C# is one of the books that should be considered to be read by experienced .NET software engineer. I would not recommend this position to fresh software engineer. This book touches many (if not all) advanced areas in .NET framework up to 4.0. Jeffrey describes how C# language is implemented the way it is or why C# compiler works as it works (i.e. why it uses callvirt IL instruction, instead of call IL instruction, when calling a non-virtual instance method). In several places author has good arguments in hand to criticize .NET development team for that how they have implemented some CLR features (i.e. Exceptions mechanism) :)

Posted on 11 August 2010

Fast Sharp is intended to be simple text editor with possibility of running C#/VB/F# code. Everything You enter in text editor is wrapped into a method and compiled on the fly. Results are displayed in output box on the bottom of the editor.

Posted on 04 August 2010

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship is a "must read" for every software engineer book. I read this book a while ago and I think it is one of the best positions in programming techniques.

Posted on 24 July 2010

Recently I needed a custom section in my app.config. Everything went fine until I got this exception: "The string must be at least 1 characters long." (System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException type) while reading the custom section.....

Posted on 21 July 2010

Recently I found that book Rob Miles - C# Development, aka. Yellow Book. Available here.

Posted on 19 July 2010

Architecture bugs are one of the hardest to solve. To solve in a proper way ;). Almost always they affect a huge part of the system. Fixes can have an impact on all application layers because mostly a fix requires changes in more than one layer. If the system is designed according to a set of rules (i.e. is not tightly coupled) then after fixing we don't have to sit and shake because something else somewhere else may crash...