There is a big set of posts about this issue lately. From Ayende's Can you learn to program better? and What can make a great programmer? to Phil Haack and his Better Programming By Programming Better to Jeff Atwood and his How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming and many others...
Well, they are all great developers and they all give us a great view for what is a great developer and how can you become one(or realize that you already are, for that matter). I like the way Jeff sums it up:
" You won't-- you cannot-- become a better programmer through sheer force of programming alone. You can only complement and enhance your existing programming skills by branching out. Learn about your users. Learn about the industry. Learn about your business. "

I agree with all of them about the ^HUGE leap each great developer should take from being a good developer into a great developer. Not many have done it, although I believe that many more can. I'm not sure if you heard about Ron Clark, his story is an amazing demostration of true passion to bring the best out of people. Ron managed to take a bunch of kids from Harlem, those that no one believe in them, and make them one of the best classes in the US. In his first lesson, he wrote on his board: "Dream Big! Take Risks!". He manged to direct his students with his 55 rules and teach them how to become a great human beings before everything else. It's a story about how to get everyone around you excited, driven to extract the very best out of themselves.

In my point of view, great developers are the one that really into code because they love it and because they want to make the rest of us guys better. They possess Ron's Passion to make everything better. The software they are building and the guys that are involved in doing it.

I tried to come up with my "rules" that helped me progress and influence others in the last 7 years:

1. Be proud of your work - The most important rule I give others - Love your job, Enjoy code, Appreciate elegant solutions and let them be your inspiration.
2. Be Eager to learn - In order to become one, you must learn the "55 rules", the foundation of your progression bar. Ayende says it best:
   " At any rate, what I am trying to say is that you need to act. Doesn't matter what you do, you need to keep pushing your knowledge until extra knowledge is easy to absorb. ". Always have a list of things you would like to know. Clear some time for you in order to progress. baby steps.
3. Write it all down - It will take you years to understand why X is "better" than Y. Why writing logic inside a stored procedure is not always the smartest thing(or why SP is not the best way in common\simple scenarios), why it's important to unit-test your classes or why loose-coupling is that important. Following only ideas from others without suffering from your mistakes will keep you always a mediocre\good programmer at best. I have started my world with Data-Access-Layer written manually, then generated it and only then using some sort of ORM tool for this task. I've learned so much in the process that "spending" years at each phase made me understand better the way I work and the way I want to work. It was worth it. I don't encourage repeating others mistakes, I just want you to follow your heart. There are mistakes worth repeating, if it will improve you and make you releaize things about yourself.
4. Seek for better ways to solve things - In time, you'll see a lot of recurrent patterns in your code. The way you write your application tiers, your data-access, your database, your sql, your security handling, your logging mechanism, how you integrate with other applications or how you create a solid framework. In time, you'll see a lot of recurrent thinking you were used to. Only in time you'll know how to solve code duplication in a proper manner, how to build a smart API and how to estimate your mission so you'll meet the deadline without staying at work for 14 hours a day.
5. Don't be afraid to get credit for your work - remember, be proud of your work. You deserve it. Take ownership!
6. Be proud of your people - Your people will make you progress or stay put. It is simple as that. 
7. Share your knowledge - I remember that a good friend of mine talked with me about whether is should help others at the office on the expense of his time. He felt that writing code for others will make them progress on his expense. I could relate to his thoughts, but I strongly disagree with him and that's what I told him: Teaching others is the best way to take the next step. Make sure you educate others, it will make them easier to give you back. I believe that this ability and willingness to teach distinguish the great ones from the good ones. If you really want to progress from being a programmer to a Team Leader\Architect\Adviser\whatever, you would need your co-workers support, right?
8. Find a mentor - find someone at work that will make you work harder just to so they would be proud of you. I call it the "work-daddy syndrome". It is much easier to motivate yourself if you know that someone expect greatness of you. My parents expected that I'll be great from the first day I could remember myself. They never pushed me too hard or made me stress. They were there for me when I needed them. Always with something good to say to calm me down. The reason I am so motivated to be the greatest programmer I can be is that I have great friends that expect it from me and I had the pleasure to work with my mentors and get their feedback to push me forward. I want to make them proud.
9. Be a mentor for others - All my life I thought that I am blessed with great family, great friends and great co-workers because I manged to contribute to others. I allow myself to feel this as I know that I do my best to contribute others, to make my surrounding feel that we're heading for a better place. That we will actually be there soon. Look hard and find someone that you can see the potential in him, and if he\she let's you, help them to become better. There is no better feeling that getting a big Thank You. I'm hardly a religious guy, but I feel it easier to except good surprises in life due to good acts on my side. If something terrible happens, I know that I have a good place to fall into, that I'll bounce back.
10. Enjoy life, it's yours - leave a funny comment in your code, don't be afraid of saying geeky comments, laugh about your\others old code. Laugh as much as you can. People will follow you if you'll know how to make them smile when things are hard. Coding can be a bitch, great programmers makes you forget it for a while.

Good luck, I know you can make it. 

I'm doing one of the most complicated UI I've ever did(ASP.NET). In the process, I need to generate tabs(via MultiView control) pragmatically and for each tab render a tree-like checkboxes. All based on external xml. Yami..

Reading a little about how to add dynamic View to MultiView control made me realize that I need to do my magic on the page's PreInit event. This one was quite easy, I've override the OnPreInit (I could register to the event in the page constructor, but this is easier) and called my dark voodoo "BuildTabs" method. All is good.

Now, Adding MasterPage to the blend made me puzzled for a few minutes. It seems that the page's controls are not initialized on the PreInit phase if the page has MasterPage. After I got my eyes back on the screen, stop nodding with disappointment and taking my head off the wall, I used my built-in behavioral program:

pre-think (short phase ~Thread.Sleep(1000*60));
while(no solution yet) { 
   try;
   think;
}.

2 minutes later I found the trick:

protected override void OnPreInit(EventArgs e)
{
   base.OnPreInit(e);
   base.Master.Init += new EventHandler(Master_Init);
}

void Master_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   BuildTabs(); //we must draw it from scratch on each post-back.
}

Now the controls are initialized and I can program in peace.

http://urikalish.blogspot.com/2007/02/beam-me-up-scotty-copy-and-paste-human.html

Talking about building solid, trustable enterprise applications...
gosh, this makes you think about real-time applications in a different perspective right?.

After you're done wiping, read ^*this dude's blog.
He is a good friend of mine and a teammate at Mercury, and by god, he knows how to write and he's never boring!

* I call him T-Bag(no physical similarity, just a private[for now] joke), but he's also known as Uri Kalish ("the man and the legend").

After digging in into BitArray with Reflector, I saw that this class, in its current state, is simply unusable; Here is why:

1.  The class does not override Equals (and ==, !=, GetHashCode). We use BitArray because bitwise comparison is relatively very fast. I don't want to perform reference comparison on bitwise array. I use bitwise structure to perform bitwise operation and bitwise comparison.

2.  This class is sealed.  Reading the first section can give you the idea why this is a mistake built on top of another mistake.

3.  The exposed bitwise operations change the state of the object. Meaning doing bitArrayInstance.And(anotherBitArray) actually change the state of bitArrayInstance. I really don't understand why this was made by design. It is very common to perform several bitwise operations on a BitArray object and perform some comparison afterwords.

We decide to disassemble the code into a new class named BitArray2 and I refactored the code so it would fit the "normal"(in my book) usage of BitArray.
The code:

BitArray2.zip (4.19 KB)

I have to following code:

BitArray arr1 = new BitArray(200);
BitArray arr2 = new BitArray(200);

arr1[2] = true;
arr2[2] = true;

if (arr1.And(arr2) == arr2)
   Console.WriteLine("good");
else 
   Console.WriteLine("bad");

It returns "bad" for some unknown reason.
My guess is that Equals implemented a reference comparison and not bitwise comparison.
It seems like a strange behavior as BitArray is classic for bitwise operations on it.

Am I missing something?

update: I've refactored Microsoft orginal BitArray and named it BitArray2. You can find it here.

After writing about "Build your weekly reading stack and frame it", I thought to share some of the blogs\articles I read lately about Personal Development. I call them my "content fillers".

• Paul's Tips - You can find here real pearls among the huge content Paul has to offer. He talks about life, creativity, productivity, time management, leadership. I love reading his stuff because it's an easy read and you can pick up a lot of great life practices(for example: Just being smart isn't enough if you want to get ahead and A neat trick for dealing with anxiety).
  
• ProductivityGoal - Great stuff about Work and Time management (I recommend the category "one question interview").
  
• Steve Pavlina - One of the greatest in the "Personal Development" area. I really recommand reading his old posts. Notice: Almost each and every one of his articles and even most of his blog posts are a great potential for your weekly reading stack (more than 4000 words per article).
  
• Scott H Young - I just started to read his stuff about a month ago. So far I'm very impressed by his level of knowledge and his original ideas for life.
  
• The practice of leadership - One of my favorites. You will have to look around this site, but investing 1 hour of wandering around in this site can fill your stack for a good couple of years.
  
• I will teach you to be rich - Great stuff about money. Facts, numbers, ideas, links.
  
• Get Money Online - if you have a site(or even better - a blog) and you want to make money out of it - read it!
  

These sites can easily provide enough content for a 5-10 years of weekly reading. I'll publish more during the next couple of weeks.
If you've got interesting sites to share - please drop a comment.

For those of you who know me, I can spend about 15-20 hours a week reading blogs\articles about various of topics (which means 1-2 days of work a week!). Sometimes, I prefer sinking into a set of articles instead of doing my chores. Though "free" reading is very important and educational, some tasks must get done. I tend to forget it and then feel uncomfortable about it. I feel like I have an elegant excuse to avoid critical tasks. "Hey", I say to myself, "It's important to read about managing my time better or the new features in .Net 3.0, so I'll read a few more articles and then I'll complete my Math homework". The reality is that I finish my Math homework the night before class which is bad for several of reasons: (1) I don't sleep well the night before, (2) I feel uneasy - "maybe I should have invest more time in it" and (3) It's "life smell" (the older brother of "code smell") meaning I know it's wrong and yet I carry on with this paradigm.

Reading blog posts or articles in "free style" may cause a huge wast of time. It happens to me all the time. I jump from post to post, from article to article and start reading until I'm tired.  About 30% of the information I read I don't remember an hour later as it wasn't all that interesting to begin with (but hey, "I can't stop in the middle right?" says the stupid voice in my head). I enjoy reading technical stuff, but I also learned to appreciate my time. It was time to come up with a system to control my reading and make the most out of my time.

Stack your reading on weekly basics

I managed to lower my wander around posts and articles. For big posts\articles, I read 1-2 paragraphs at the beginning and the last one and decide if it's important enough to get inside my weekly reading stack. If it's a small interesting post, I read it all the way (avoiding reading the first & last paragraph again later from my stack) and throw it away(of my mind). How can you save your post\article into your stack? My system is very easy. I've created a directory named "Reading Stack" on my desktop, there I use the browser's "Save As..." menu item in order to save an offline copy of the post\article.

This directory must fill just enough data to read for one week. No more and no less. I don't want to carry my reading material from one week to the next one as it will decrease my motivation in time ("damn, I can't seem to overcome the amount of data I want to read" syndrom). I read about 7 big(~3000-5000 words) articles a week and about 50-80 small ones(from my SharpReader). I pick my articles very carefully and thus using my time wisely as opposed to before where I've read a lot of useless data and wandering around blogs.

Frame it (with time)

As I've mention, packing the data is hard but not as hard as finding the time reading it. You must find some time in your schedule to invest for reading (it takes about 5 years of 1 hour reading a day to become an expert in a given field). Try to find some "delta" time that you're currently not using. For me, it was the time before my university classes and during some of the breaks. I usually arrive to my class(with my laptop) about 20 minutes before the lesson starts. This is ideal for reading almost 1 big post\article. I sometimes read during the lesson itself (watch out for this one, I won't recommend it for anyone, but it works for me) and read a few paragraphs during the breaks(while talking to folks at my class). I usually manage to finish about 2 big posts\articles during one class. Luckily I have 2 of them during my week so that 4 big posts\articles. The remaining reading I do in the weekend, but I have only 3 left so it would be much easier to finish (Weeoow! one more tasks is done!). Try to figure out your "dead" time (waiting for a doctor, watching a game(read along if it's not that important game), if you use the train - it's a perfect dead time) and add to it the amount of time you need in order to be happy with your weekly reading.

That's it. I'm now reading about 25-30 big articles a month which means around 200-250 articles a year! This is a number I can easily live with while still have time for my chores. I feel easy to start reading something and then save it to my articles stack. I _know_ I'll read it later this week so I'm not afraid of losing this information. I'm still investing a large amount of hours (~10-15) for my weekly reading, but most of these hours are taken from "dead" time I've got anyway.

I'm working with Visual Studio .Net for about 4 years now. To be honest, it's one of the greatest IDE I've ever worked with but the amount of memory it consumes simply knocks the best of my computers. I'm currently using VS.NET 2005 with SP1 and the average memory allocation is ~200MB-~500MB. Now, I usually need to see a few solutions in front of me in order to work so from the total of 2G of memory I have, about ~1G is taken by Visual Studio instance(s). That is just too much, developer need some memory for other application you know (aka Outlook).

One of the obvious suggestions in this scenario is to create some sort of "master" solution and thus working with one instance of VS.NET that contains all the projects I need (from all the solutions). That is a good suggestion unless it was so boring to do and simply took too long(let's face it, no one wants to waste about 5 minutes to create some sort of _temporary_ "master" solution each time he needs to see 2-3 solutions in front of him).

I came up with the idea to develop some sort of automatic solution builder with the following logic:

Let’s say I have an open solution X.sln.

Now I’m trying to open Y.sln.

 

The user will be asked if he wants to join X & Y into a temporary "master" solution (Z.sln) and if so:

1). The current open instance of VS.NET will save X.sln.

2). Generate a new solution: Z.sln

   2.1) This solution will contain 2 “Solution Folder” (a new feature in VS.NET 2005):

X solution directory

   Contain all the projects from the original X.sln.

Y solution         

   Contain all the projects from the original Y.sln.

 

The user will have the option to select a “Solution Folder” and set it as the “active solution” (just like you select "active project"). Only the "Active Solution" will be built. I am not sure how useful this feature is, but I believe we do _not_ want to compile all of our projects in this master solution each and every time we build the solution. If you think about it, we usually need the other solutions open just to look at them while we're trying to develop a feature or solving a bug.

  

This will decrease VS.NET memory usage and let me see all of the required data _without_ switching VS.NET instances and most important - no need to "build" the puzzle by hand.

 

Thinking about the constant time usage trade-off, I want to hear from you guys. Would you use this sort of utility? Do you really need it? Do you need any other functionality? Want to help me build it?

(Before you start - give a look at C# and XML Source Code Documentation)

So you build up a nice API that everyone can use but you want to provide nice, IntelliSense-enabled comments along with your magical code right?
Let's say I have the class Logger in my "Infrastructure" dll:

/// <summary>
/// Our logger....
/// </summary>
public class Logger
{
   /// <summary>
   /// Log the given message...
   /// </summary>
   /// <param name="messageToLog">The message to log.</param>
   public void Log(string messageToLog)
   {
   }
}

Now, my clients(e.g other teammates) want to use this logger. Adding a quick "File Reference" to the dll and they are good to go. This is great _but_ they also want to see the comments I provided as they type (IntelliSense in action baby). Surprisingly enough, they will _not_ see it "by default":

As you can see (well, not see, but that's my case) - we don't see the class comment "Our logger...". The same goes for our Log method:

Where are my comments ?!!?

Well, it turns out that you should make a small change to make it alright. Say hello to "XML Documentation file". Open the Project Properties, under the "Build" tab there is a little checkbox named "XML Documentation file" - make sure it's checked and you're done!
All you have to do is to recompile the dll and add the reference again (e.g remove & add, Dumb, but works) or manually copy the generated xml file to your bin directory (if CopyLocal = true).

     

 

Conclusions:

You should always make sure that "XML Documentation file" is checked!
Why providing comments if no one can see them (unless you have access to the code and you make a "Project Reference").

I'm not sure why Microsoft made this checkbox unchecked as default.
Am I missing something here?