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  • My Latest Hare-Brained Scheme

    - by Liam McLennan
    I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment. My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:   and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as: which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release. I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are: There  is no market for this tool There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.

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  • Craftsmanship Tour Day 1: Didit Long Island

    - by Liam McLennan
    On Monday I was at Didit for my first ever craftsmanship visit. Didit seem to occupy a good part of a non-descript building in Rockville Centre Long Island. Since I had arrived early from Seattle I had some time to kill, so I stopped at the Rockville Diner on the corner of N Park Ave and Sunrise Hwy. I thoroughly enjoyed the pancakes and the friendly service. After walking to the Didit office I met Rik Dryfoos, the Didit Engineering Manager who organised my visit, and got the introduction to Didit and the work they are doing. I spent the morning in the room shared by the Didit developers, who are working on some fascinating deep engineering problems. After lunch at a local Thai place I setup a webcam to record an interview with Rik and Matt Roman (Didit VP of Engineering). I had a lot of trouble with the webcam, including losing several minutes of conversation, but in the end I was very happy the result. Here are the full interviews with Rik and Matt: Interview with Rik Dryfoos Interview with Matt Roman We had a great chat, much of which is captured in the recording. It was such great conversation that I almost missed my train to Manhattan. I’m sure Didit will continue to do well with such a dedicated and enthusiastic team. I sincerely thank them for hosting me for the day. If you are looking for a true agile environment and the opportunity to work with a high quality team then you should talk to Didit.

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  • Craftsmanship Tour Day 0: New York

    - by Liam McLennan
    Arriving at JFK, at dawn, is beautiful. From above 1,000ft I can see no crime, poverty or ugliness – just the dark orange sunrise-through-smog. The Atlantic appears calm, and I take that as a good sign. Today is the first day of my software craftsmanship tour. I will be visiting three of the shining lights of the software industry over five days, exchanging ideas and learning. Arriving on the red eye from Seattle I feel like hell. My lips, not used to the dry air, are cracked and bleeding. I get changed in the JFK restroom and make my way from the airport. Following Rik’s directions I take the airtrain to Jamaica. Rik is an engineering manager at Didit in Long Island, the first stop on my tour. From Jamaica I take the Long Island Rail Road train to Rockville Centre, home of Didit.

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  • Lessons Building KeyRef (a .NET developer learning Rails)

    - by Liam McLennan
    Just because I like to build things, and I like to learn, I have been working on a keyboard shortcut reference site. I am using this as an opportunity to improve my ruby and rails skills. The first few days were frustrating. Perhaps the learning curve of all the fun new toys was a bit excessive. Finally tonight things have really started to come together. I still don’t understand the rails built-in testing support but I will get there. Interesting Things I Learned Tonight RubyMine IDE Tonight I switched to RubyMine instead of my usual Notepad++. I suspect RubyMine is a powerful tool if you know how to use it – but I don’t. At the moment it gives me errors about some gems not being activated. This is another one of those things that I will get to. I have also noticed that the editor functions significantly differently to the editors I am used to. For example, in visual studio and notepad++ if you place the cursor at the start of a line and press left arrow the cursor is sent to the end of the previous line. In RubyMine nothing happens. Haml Haml is my favourite view engine. For my .NET work I have been using its non-union Mexican CLR equivalent – nHaml. Multiple CSS Classes To define a div with more than one css class haml lets you chain them together with a ‘.’, such as: .span-6.search_result contents of the div go here Indent Consistency I also learnt tonight that both haml and nhaml complain if you are not consistent about indenting. As a consequence of the move from notepad++ to RubyMine my haml views ended up with some tab indenting and some space indenting. For the view to render all of the indents within a view must be consistent. Sorting Arrays I guessed that ruby would be able to sort an array alphabetically by a property of the elements so my first attempt was: Application.all.sort {|app| app.name} which does not work. You have to supply a comparer (much like .NET). The correct sort is: Application.all.sort {|a,b| a.name.downcase <=> b.name.downcase} MongoMapper Find by Id Since document databases are just fancy key-value stores it is essential to be able to easily search for a document by its id. This functionality is so intrinsic that it seems that the MongoMapper author did not bother to document it. To search by id simply pass the id to the find method: Application.find(‘4c19e8facfbfb01794000002’) Rails And CoffeeScript I am a big fan of CoffeeScript so integrating it into this application is high on my priorities. My first thought was to copy Dr Nic’s strategy. Unfortunately, I did not get past step 1. Install Node.js. I am doing my development on Windows and node is unix only. I looked around for a solution but eventually had to concede defeat… for now. Quicksearch The front page of the application I am building displays a list of applications. When the user types in the search box I want to reduce the list of applications to match their search. A quick googlebing turned up quicksearch, a jquery plugin. You simply tell quicksearch where to get its input (the search textbox) and the list of items to filter (the divs containing the names of applications) and it just works. Here is the code: $('#app_search').quicksearch('.search_result'); Summary I have had a productive evening. The app now displays a list of applications, allows them to be sorted and links through to an application page when an application is selected. Next on the list is to display the set of keyboard shortcuts for an application.

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  • Less is more: The making of a 37 signals style pizza

    - by Liam McLennan
    For years now we have been hearing from 37 signals that the way to bake a great web app is to build less – well the same is true of pizza. Our western hedonism has led us to pursue ever cheesier and more stuffed crusts at the expense of the simple flavours. All we are left with is a fatty, salty heart attack in waiting. The Italians know that the secret to great taste is simplicity. With that in mind I decided to base my pizza masterpiece on these simple flavours: tomato sopressa (spicy aged salami) mozzarella garlic basil Of course the first thing one needs when making pizza is a base.   A freshly made base is extremely important but unfortunately I was too lazy. Next up is the tomato sauce. My wife made the sauce by reducing some tomatoes and adding herbs and sugar. We had selected some fine ingredients to make our topping: sopressa salami, fresh basil and the best mozzarella we could find.   It is, according to google, important to bake pizza at a high temperature, so I set the oven to 250C (480F). Here are the before and after shots: Meanwhile, the dog did nothing.

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  • New York Alt.NET Dinner

    - by Liam McLennan
    While I was in the New York area Stephen Bohlen graciously organised an Alt.NET dinner. I left Rockville Centre on the 17:15 train, thinking I had plenty of time to get to Toloache Mexican Bistro on W 50th St. However, when I changed at Penn Station I took the service downtown, instead of uptown. I corrected that mistake and made it to 51st St, but then ended up in completely the wrong place because I did not understand the street numbering system. For future reference I now have the following rules for NYC navigation: Uptown means North, Downtown means South Streets run East-West, Avenues North-South Street number are symmetrical on the 5th Avenue axis. That is, street numbers increase from zero both east and west of 5th Av. Having gotten totally confused I called Steve, who helped me find the restaurant. I still had my luggage, which we stowed in a corner. Over some descent Mexican food we had some great discussions about Alt.NET, the 2010 conference, and other things of interest to Alt.NET folks. Thanks to Steve for organising and to all the guys who turned up.

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  • Why&rsquo;s Poignant Guide To Ruby

    - by Liam McLennan
    According to Wikipedia, “why the lucky stiff was the persona of an anonymous, but prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer”. He looks a bit like Jack Black. His book, Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, is a classic, though it can be hard to find since Why disappeared. If you want to learn the Ruby programming language I highly recommend Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. I am including a link here so that others who search for it may find it more easily.

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  • New Company Website

    - by Liam McLennan
    For a long time now my company website has been showing its age. It was a dot net nuke monstrosity. Today I have deployed a new website for my company. I hope that it reflects my commitment to quality and minimalism. Please have a look and let me know what you think.

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  • KeyRef &ndash; A Keyboard Shortcut Reference Site

    - by Liam McLennan
    The mouse is like computer training wheels. It makes using a computer easier – but it slows you down. Like many of my peers I am making a effort to learn keyboard shortcuts to reduce my dependence on the mouse. So I have started accumulating browser bookmarks to websites listing keyboard shortcuts for vim and resharper etc. Based on the assumption that I am not the only person who finds this untenable I am considering building the ultimate keyboard shortcut reference site. This is an opportunity for me to improve my rails skills and hopefully contribute something useful to the anti-mouse community. Mockups Shortcuts will be grouped by application, so the first thing a user needs to do is find their application. They do this by typing the application name into a textbox and then selecting from a reducing list of applications. This interface will work like the stackoverflow tags page. Selecting an application will take the user to a page that lists the shortcuts for that application. This page will have a permalink for bookmarking. Shortcuts can be searched by keyword or by using the shortcut.

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  • JavaScript Class Patterns Revisited: Endgame

    - by Liam McLennan
    I recently described some of the patterns used to simulate classes (types) in JavaScript. But I missed the best pattern of them all. I described a pattern I called constructor function with a prototype that looks like this: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); and I mentioned that the problem with this pattern is that it does not provide any encapsulation, that is, it does not allow private variables. Jan Van Ryswyck recently posted the solution, obvious in hindsight, of wrapping the constructor function in another function, thereby allowing private variables through closure. The above example becomes: var Person = (function() { // private variables go here var name,age; function constructor(n, a) { name = n; age = a; } constructor.prototype = { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age + " years old."; } }; return constructor; })(); var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Now we have prototypal inheritance and encapsulation. The important thing to understand is that the constructor, and the toString function both have access to the name and age private variables because they are in an outer scope and they become part of the closure.

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  • Sneaky Javascript For Loop Bug

    - by Liam McLennan
    Javascript allows you to declare variables simply by assigning a value to an identify, in the same style as ruby: myVar = "some text"; Good javascript developers know that this is a bad idea because undeclared variables are assigned to the global object, usually window, making myVar globally visible. So the above code is equivalent to: window.myVar = "some text"; What I did not realise is that this applies to for loop initialisation as well. for (i = 0; i < myArray.length; i += 1) { } // is equivalent to for (window.i = 0; window.i < myArray.length; window.i += 1) { } Combine this with function calls nested inside of the for loops and you get some very strange behaviour, as the value of i is modified simultaneously by code in different scopes. The moral of the story is to ALWAYS declare javascript variables with the var keyword, even when intialising a for loop. for (var i = 0; i < myArray.length; i += 1) { }

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  • Can inbound links through template-based layouts result in penalties?

    - by Liam Sorsby
    So obviously link building is encouraged as long as it is natural, organic and has meaningful links with content relevant to your site. Obviously with the constant release of new updates to algorithms, Google is flagging sites for unnatural links to their sites. My Question is: Can this be caused by templating systems? With WordPress for example, where you can add a link on the footer and it is repeated throughout the entire website generating thousands of links? If we don't add any links, Good Content will be re-posted and linked to, surely if your content is constantly linked to this will flag your site for "unnatural" content as it's difficult to see if someone has been paid to write an article on your content. Or does Google just simply want us to audit some of the links to show we are making an effort? As you can tell we have had a Manual action for: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links. However, this seems to impact our website as well. Edit: To clarify the question: Can you get penalised for paying for advertising on a site that uses a templated sidebar. So when they create a new blog/page ect your link is also added onto the page hence resulting in 1000's of links to one page on our site. I know that one effect maybe a 0 pagerank web page linking to your page dilutes the PR of our page. However the links are only inbound not reciprocal

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  • apt-get update very slow, stuck at "Waiting for headers"

    - by Liam
    I have looked at similar questions: Stuck at 0% [waiting for headers] (apt) apt-get update stuck on "Waiting for Headers" However neither one of them answer my problem. I am running 12.04 AMD64 and have recently started getting an issue that when I update my repos from my connection at home through a terminal, using sudo apt-get update, it takes forever (literally after 2 hours it was at 28%), however when I run from a different location it takes less than 5 minutes to complete. I have attempted changing which mirror I use but that does not solve the issue. I have also cut down what is in my sources list but this also makes no difference. There are no faults on my ADSL line as I have already contacted my ISP to check this. It also makes no difference if I use a WiFi or network cable connection. What could be my issue? A speed test (www.speedtest.net) comes out at about 0.9 Mbps down and 0.42 Mbps up (which is a shade under the advertised line speed), I reside in South Africa and use the UCT LEG server. But I have also tried the other mirrors available in SA....none of them make a difference.

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  • mongoDB Management Studio

    - by Liam McLennan
    This weekend I have been in Sydney at the MS Web Camp, learning about web application development. At the end of the first day we came up with application ideas and pitched them. My idea was to build a web management application for mongoDB. mongoDB I pitched my idea, put down the microphone, and then someone asked, “what’s mongo?”. Good question. MongoDB is a document database that stores JSON style documents. This is a JSON document for a tweet from twitter: db.tweets.find()[0] { "_id" : ObjectId("4bfe4946cfbfb01420000001"), "created_at" : "Thu, 27 May 2010 10:25:46 +0000", "profile_image_url" : "http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/600304197/Snapshot_2009-07-26_13-12-43_normal.jpg", "from_user" : "drearyclocks", "text" : "Does anyone know who has better coverage, Optus or Vodafone? Telstra is still too expensive.", "to_user_id" : null, "metadata" : { "result_type" : "recent" }, "id" : { "floatApprox" : 14825648892 }, "geo" : null, "from_user_id" : 6825770, "search_term" : "telstra", "iso_language_code" : "en", "source" : "&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tweetdeck.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TweetDeck&lt;/a&gt;" } A mongodb server can have many databases, each database has many collections (instead of tables) and a collection has many documents (instead of rows). Development Day 2 of the Sydney MS Web Camp was allocated to building our applications. First thing in the morning I identified the stories that I wanted to implement: Scenario: View databases Scenario: View Collections in a database Scenario: View Documents in a Collection Scenario: Delete a Collection Scenario: Delete a Database Scenario: Delete Documents Over the course of the day the team (3.5 developers) implemented all of the planned stories (except ‘delete a database’) and also implemented the following: Scenario: Create Database Scenario: Create Collection Lessons Learned I’m new to MongoDB and in the past I have only accessed it from Ruby (for my hare-brained scheme). When it came to implementing our MongoDB management studio we discovered that their is no official MongoDB driver for .NET. We chose to use NoRM, honestly just because it was the only one I had heard of. NoRM was a challenge. I think it is a fine library but it is focused on mapping strongly typed objects to MongoDB. For our application we had no prior knowledge of the types that would be in the MongoDB database so NoRM was probably a poor choice. Here are some screens (click to enlarge):

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  • Console 2: An upgraded windows console

    - by Liam McLennan
    Lately I have been using the windows console a lot. I find that I often need a number of console windows open at once. The regular windows console does not handle this well. Console2 is a more advanced console for windows. It has a tabbed interface and a number of other nice features. It supports alpha transparency if you have Mac envy, it has improved text selection and copy/paste and it is far more customizable than the default console. If you look in the background of the above image you can see this post. Now you know what the matrix is.

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  • Managing .NET Deployment Configuration With Rake

    - by Liam McLennan
    Rake is a ruby internal DSL for build scripting. With (or without) the help of albacore rake makes an excellent build scripting tool for .NET projects. The albacore documentation does a good job of explaining how to build solutions with rake but there is nothing to assist with another common build task – updating configuration files. The following ruby script provides some helper methods for performing common configuration changes that are required as part of a build process.  class ConfigTasks def self.set_app_setting(config_file, key, value) ovsd_element = config_file.root.elements['appSettings'].get_elements("add[@key='#{key}']")[0] ovsd_element.attributes['value'] = value end def self.set_connection_string(config_file, name, connection_string) conn_string_element = config_file.root.elements['connectionStrings'].get_elements("add[@name='#{name}']")[0] conn_string_element.attributes['connectionString'] = connection_string end def self.set_debug_compilation(config_file, debug_compilation) compilation_element = config_file.root.elements['system.web'].get_elements("compilation")[0] compilation_element.attributes['debug'] = false end private def self.write_xml_to_file(xml_document, file) File.open(file, 'w') do |config_file| formatter = REXML::Formatters::Default.new formatter.write(xml_document, config_file) end end end To use, require the file and call the class methods, passing the configuration file name and any other parameters. require 'config_tasks' ConfigTasks.set_app_setting 'web.config', 'enableCache', 'false'

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  • Trying to Organise a Software Craftsman Pilgrimage

    - by Liam McLennan
    As I have previously written, I am trying to organise a software craftsman pilgrimage. The idea is to donate some time working with quality developers so that we learn from each other. To be honest I am also trying to be the worst. “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.” Pat Metheny I ended up posting a message to both the software craftsmanship group and the Seattle Alt.NET group and I got a good response from both. I have had discussions with people based in: Seattle, New York, Long Island, Austin and Chicago. Over the next week I have to juggle my schedule and confirm the company(s) I will be spending time with, but the good news is it seems that I will not be left hanging.

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  • Oracle VM server for SPARC 2.2 on S11

    - by Liam Merwick
    Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 has been released for a little while now. The https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization blog has an overview of all the 2.2 features. Initially, what was released was the SVR4 package for Solaris 10 (which is unbundled and wasn't constrained by any external schedule). On Solaris 11, the 'ldomsmanager' package is built into Solaris (and therefore doesn't need to be downloaded separately) so it is delivered as part of an S11 Support Repository Update (SRU). Some of the features in 2.2 are specific to S11 (SR-IOV and the ability to live migrate between machines with different CPU types) and so there have been many requests to know when are the S11 bits coming. Solaris 11 SRU8.5 was released on Friday and this includes Oracle VM server for SPARC 2.2 so if you're already running an S11 SRU all you need do is a 'pkg update' to get the 2.2 bits. If you're still running the original S11 and your 'pkg publisher' output shows the /release repository then you'll need to sign up for the /support repo by getting the appropriate keys and certificates to access the repository (requires a support contract). The 2.2 Admin Guide documents how to do this upgrade on S11 Two S11 articles which have some useful details on upgrading (not just 'ldomsmanager') via the support repositories are: How to Update Oracle Solaris 11 Systems From Oracle Support Repositories by Glynn Foster Tips for Updating Your Oracle Solaris 11 System from the Oracle Support Repository by Peter Dennis In particular, if you'd like to stick with the v2.1 release when upgrading to SRU8.5 or greater, see the 'pkg freeze' section of Peter's article.

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  • Paying it Forward

    - by Liam McLennan
    You’re a talented guy (or girl). You’ve done alright. Years of hard work and stick-to-it-ive-ness have paid off and left you with plenty and an opportunity to make a positive difference to someone else. And then there are people with less than they need. Sometimes all they need to help themselves is a start. Opportunity International provide micro financing to help people grow their small businesses so that they can afford food, shelter, water and education. microfinance to solve poverty   MonsoonerOrLater This June, Chris, Angus (my brother) and I are travelling to India, entering into a rickshaw race and raising money for charity (Opportunity International and Round Table India). The Deccan Odyssey is a nine day rally, racing up the coast of India from Goa to Mumbai in a three wheeled motorbike. If you would like to support us, please make a tax deductable donation via our secure site at GoFundraise. For more information take a look at the MonsoonerOrLater site. If you live in Brisbane come along to An Evening With MonsoonerOrLater. The entry fee includes a three-course Indian meal, live music, henna tattooist, chilli eating competition, best bollywood dance off, Dhalsim Vs Dhalsim Street fighter, Delhi Belly Bet, Auctions and Prizes. All profits go to our charities: Round Table India and Opportunity International.

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  • Handy Javascript array Extensions &ndash; distinct()

    - by Liam McLennan
    The following code adds a method to javascript arrays that returns a distinct list of values. Array.prototype.distinct = function() { var derivedArray = []; for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i += 1) { if (!derivedArray.contains(this[i])) { derivedArray.push(this[i]) } } return derivedArray; }; and to demonstrate: alert([1,1,1,2,2,22,3,4,5,6,7,5,4].distinct().join(',')); This produces 1,2,22,3,4,5,6,7

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  • Ad-hoc String Manipulation With Visual Studio

    - by Liam McLennan
    Visual studio supports relatively advanced string manipulation via the ‘Quick Replace’ dialog. Today I had a requirement to modify some html, replacing line breaks with unordered list items. For example, I need to convert: Infrastructure<br/> Energy<br/> Industrial development<br/> Urban growth<br/> Water<br/> Food security<br/> to: <li>Infrastructure</li> <li>Energy</li> <li>Industrial development</li> <li>Urban growth</li> <li>Water</li> <li>Food security</li> This cannot be done with a simple search-and-replace but it can be done using the Quick Replace regular expression support. To use regular expressions expand ‘Find Options’, check ‘Use:’ and select ‘Regular Expressions’ Typically, Visual Studio regular expressions use a different syntax to every other regular expression engine. We need to use a capturing group to grab the text of each line so that it can be included in the replacement. The syntax for a capturing group is to replace the part of the expression to be captured with { and }. So my regular expression: {.*}\<br/\> means capture all the characters before <br/>. Note that < and > have to be escaped with \. In the replacement expression we can use \1 to insert the previously captured text. If the search expression had a second capturing group then its text would be available in \2 and so on. Visual Studio’s quick replace feature can be scoped to a selection, the current document, all open documents or every document in the current solution.

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  • Why the R# Method Group Refactoring is Evil

    - by Liam McLennan
    The refactoring I’m talking about is recommended by resharper when it sees a lambda that consists entirely of a method call that is passed the object that is the parameter to the lambda. Here is an example: public class IWishIWasAScriptingLanguage { public void SoIWouldntNeedAllThisJunk() { (new List<int> {1, 2, 3, 4}).Select(n => IsEven(n)); } private bool IsEven(int number) { return number%2 == 0; } } When resharper gets to n => IsEven(n) it underlines the lambda with a green squiggly telling me that the code can be replaced with a method group. If I apply the refactoring the code becomes: public class IWishIWasAScriptingLanguage { public void SoIWouldntNeedAllThisJunk() { (new List<int> {1, 2, 3, 4}).Select(IsEven); } private bool IsEven(int number) { return number%2 == 0; } } The method group syntax implies that the lambda’s parameter is the same as the IsEven method’s parameter. So a readable, explicit syntax has been replaced with an obfuscated, implicit syntax. That is why the method group refactoring is evil.

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