While helping with the development of our Tasks application I stumbled upon a strange compiler error. There was a lambda expression that was compiling just fine before I touched the file with the lambda and after changing a line inside the body of the lambda, the project suddenly stopped compiling. The error was, that it could not find an adequate overload of the method that accepted the lambda in question as an argument. The cause turned out to be very interesting(for me at least) and I think it is worth sharing. Consider that you have a function with two overloads that both accept...

Q3 2011 release is getting close and we are eager to share some of the improvements that we have been working on lately. We have always been relying on your feedback to better shape our tools for your purposes. This time it is no different. RadPropertyGrid will get three highly requested features. The first feature will allow you to add custom items in the RadPropertyGrid by using RadPropertyStore. It is a collection of PropertyStoreItems which contain information that describes a property, its type, name, value, etc. When the RadPropertyStore is set to the SelectedObject property of the RadPropertyGrid, it displays these...

Back in late August/early September I spoke at the Rocky Mountain Ruby conference in Boulder, Colorado. My talk was about lessons learned dealing with large functional test suites over my career. For example, at a previous job I ran a team that got up to 9,000 Selenium tests scattered across roughly 850 test fixtures. I’ve had similar experiences working on other projects too. The talk was videotaped and is now up on the Confreaks video hosting site: Surviving Growing from Zero to 15,000 Selenium Tests. Yes, the talk’s title is wrong. I goofed when submitting it. The fundamentals I ...

A lot of people have posted tributes to Steve Jobs over the past week. I’ve seen him called the CEO of the Decade (something I agree with) and also compared to Henry Ford (I sort of agree with). I’d like to call attention to four lessons we can learn from Steve Jobs’ Apple, two positive and two negative. First the good: Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma. In a nutshell, the Innovator’s Dilemma says the following (I am paraphrasing): when you invent something, first you are trying to penetrate a new market and convince people to buy your...

While working up a blog post today on creating a simple game with HTML5, I tested the app on my iPhone and found something quite interesting.  It was ridiculously slow. You can check out the application here and see it’s performance on your mobile device.  It appears to...