June 2006 Blog Posts
I was pondering this today while wielding a shovel to bury the drain pipes that hang off my rain gutters (new house and all, this is the kind of crap I get to do with my weekends). Shoveling is one of my least favorite activities, but it is simple enough to allow the mind to wander.
I was trying to pick out some things that I have been prone to do in the past that has hindered my performance as a developer. One of these things is the need (arrogance?) to code things proper on the very first try. I don't...
Karl made a confession and I just wanted him to know that not only is he not alone, but as far as the Agile Manifesto is concerned, TDD isn't even mentioned. Too often I think we see people lumping TDD in with Agile when it's not really there at all.
As far as TDD is concerned, people fall into several camps:
No tests at all
Tests for complex processes only (my camp)
Tests for every single method in the application
Personally I find both extremes to be rather irresponsible when it comes to the business value and cost of what is being produced. For example, I don't...
Throughout my time in consulting, mentoring, and full time work I have come to notice a few signs that tend to lead to over budget, late, and failed projects. The intention of this post is to share these insights, hopefully with a bit of humor and it is definitely not to be taken as religious mantra. =)
Sign 1: “What We Need Is A Rules Engine”
This statement always hits me like the bell toll of doom. While I’m certain that there are scenarios that justify a rules engine the most common time I have...
Wouldn't be complete if I didn't speak on the worst of TechEd.
Bill Gates Steps Down: Bill, next time let me know first so I can sell my stock to avoid the dip and buy it back at a discount.
Bus Drivers: They frequently missed the dropoff point forcing me to ride around the conference center at least twice, and then the unions went on strike which inconvenienced everyone.
Windows Workflow Foundation: Of all the new .NET Framework 3.0 technologies this one did the least for me. I need to look into it some more, I must be missing something, but it seemed...
I suppose I should comment on Bill Gates' announcement, but honestly, if I had 1/20th of his money, I would have retired long ago.
TechEd was a lot of fun, but tiring. I didn't make it to Fenway tonight for the big concert tonight because I'm wiped out and I'm going to bed early. Here is the stuff I found most exciting at TechEd:
Team System for Database Professionals: It appears to be everything I was hoping for. This is a very powerful tool which should make working with SQL Server much more productive.
Windows Presentation Foundation: Wow... all I can say is...
Also last night I attended the Agile birds of a feather session hosted by Jeff Palermo. Very nice discussion with success stories and failures as well as several questions about how to get your organization moving towards the principles of Agile.
As I often see, being a student of business and development both, developer's biggest problem seems to revolve around them not speaking the same language as business people. Developers see the principles of agile and they make a lot of sense, but when they communicate this to managers and executives they fail to focus on the aspects that make it...
So I sat through the session moderated by sahil, and I must say it was pretty interesting with a decent dialogue going on. I had downloaded the beta bits and toyed around with them a bit previously, but not in any thorough detail.
There was a nice Q&A session at the end, but I didn't get to ask all the questions I wanted to ask, so I'm going to post them here, and hopefully someone in the community will pick them up and run with them.
DLINQ seems to generate some kind of mapping file to the database. This brought up a...
Day 1. I spent the morning getting the lay of the land, the convention center is pretty nice. I did get some time to play with the team server for database professionals that I blogged about last week and it looks like it is shaping up to be everything I hoped it would be. I may finally be able to set the sql server management tools aside and do all my work in the Visual Studio IDE.
The rest of the day I'm going to spend in seminars and I'm still waiting for the vendor area to open up to see...
I've been quite busy with various life things recently, but I was very flattered when Eric Sink offered me a copy of his book, the business of software. Apparently my hanging around in the joel on software forums paid off. =)
Anyways, I'm sure many of you have seen his articles on msdn, and those of you who frequent Joel have seen his posts. Eric runs Sourcegear which is most notable for it's very nice Vault product which in my opinion is a much better alternative to sourcesafe.
I'm sure that many of us developers (myself included) have dreamed of throwing off the...
If you're interested in DLINQ you should be reading sahil's series on DLINQ as well as the series by Scott Guthrie.
DLINQ seems pretty neat. It might be growing on me.
I got pretty excited when I came across this. For all the back and forth about stored procedures / ad-hoc the thing that has been missing in the DBA world is a clean interface for DBAs with developers. I currently use database projects to version my stored procedures, but it's not all that elegant or impressive of a solution.
It seems like this is going to be addressed! It also allows for T-SQL unit testing which should be interesting. If Microsoft successfully pulls this off, does the whole argument about business logic in the classes vs stored procedures go away? Afterall,...