Grant Winney

I write when I've got something to share - a personal project, a solution to a difficult problem, or just an idea. We learn by doing and sharing. We've all got something to contribute.

Articles of Grant Winney

reflection surviving winforms

Jan 22, 2022

Beware the bite of the refactor bug

Refactoring code is part of the dev life, and can even help keep the code healthy, but going too far can do more harm than good. Ever after a decade of writing code, I still have to remind myself from time to time!

surviving winforms mocking unit testing nunit

Jan 6, 2022

Mocking MessageBox (or any static class) in WinForms

Unit testing a WinForms app is an uphill battle in the best of times, before you add in classes like MessageBox. Let's make the best of it.

the devops handbook devops

Jan 2, 2022

New year, new goals

My book for January is The DevOps Handbook. I've only read the Intro and feel smarter already. ;)

c#surviving winforms

Dec 29, 2021

Using nameof to avoid magic strings

There's a lot of ways to make our code work for us. Let's check out using the nameof operator to avoid magic strings.

bot detection ddos

Dec 23, 2021

Why am I getting a "Please complete the security check" error?

I visited a page the other day and saw something odd.. a page that said it was checking my browser. It's unpolished and unfriendly, and my first instinct was to just close the tab and forget it. Then I dropped to the bottom of the page and noticed the link to Cloudflare. Interesting.

reflection timeboxing teamwork

Dec 20, 2021

Sunk costs, timeboxing, and asking for help

One of the biggest struggles I have with programming is knowing when to ask for help. A little struggle is necessary for growth, but when am I just wasting time when I could be learning from others?

surviving winforms debugging exception handling

Dec 7, 2021

The helpful exception box

If you're in a legacy codebase with a centralized "message box" form, why not add some features that make it work for you? 😏

reflection planning

Dec 6, 2021

Keeping my eyes on the road ahead

One of the first things I learned while driving was to look as far down the road as possible, to plan for obstacles before they became a problem. Looking back, I realize how important that is for handling most things in life.

DigitalOcean is a versatile, affordable cloud provider. You can serve up a blog (like this one!), deploy a wiki, try out ansible, or do something much bigger. They host the annual Hacktoberfest too.

Hyvor Talk

Hyvor Talk is a privacy-friendly, user-friendly commenting system. Compared to Disqus, my pages load faster, engagement has increased, and I don't have to worry about ads. The team is responsive and quick to communicate and fix issues. Try them out!