Community Blogs

I often identify myself as an Agilist. When I first began to use the term, I was met with a great deal of trepidation. I remember the first few times I attended the local user group. “Oh, you’re one of those guys”. This hesitation has diminished considerably, but I still find that there are some interesting misconceptions about agile. For example, people frequently contrast Agile with Pragmatic . “Oh, I’ve heard about SOLID principles (or whatever), but I’m really more pragmatic.” This has actually made me laugh out loud. You see, it was pragmatism that drove me towards the agile philosophy. According to Meriam-Webster, pragmatic means: relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters...

I am sure that most of you have heard the term ‘Ivory Tower Architect’ and most of have a mental image of what this means.  To me, when I hear the team I think of a person or team of washed up, has been developers who are no longer capable of creating quality code so now they have been relegated to ‘mandating process and standards’.  What got me thinking about this was a comment to one of my recent posts about doing pull and compiles on your source code .  In this post I speak about how your team/organization needs to be able to simply pull and compile all and any source in about 5 minutes.  I also mention that the source should not depend on any 3rd party installs to simply compile, but if it MUST (and I know, I know there...

I know this may seem like old hat to many, but trust me not all organizations/projects are setup to allow you to easily pull the code from your source repository and compile.  I know it is sad, but if you ask me, this is just the tip of the ice burg in terms of what is ultimately wrong with our profession. For those of you who may NOT think that pulling and compiling is absolutely necessary let me ask you one thing.  What value are you providing your organization if a someone who is new to a project (could be new employee, new team member, or even someone with a new computer) cannot pull and compile your source code in about 5 minutes? Here is What does a ‘bad process’ look like? (These are in no particular order) User must download...

Part of my job at work is to teach and mentor other developers on our team. Right now I am in the process of teaching two of our developers how to create unit tests (notice I did NOT say integration tests because most anyone can do those). We are also learning how to create our tests by utilizing an Isolation Framework (aka mocking framework). I am really excited for this opportunity because I firmly believe that you create better software when you do it by creating tests to prove your code works. I am also excited because both of the developer buy into the idea of testing and are extremely eager to learn how to to better test their code. Because we had a few days of downtime because of the Christmas holiday before our 1st sprint on our project...

Today I posted a comment to one of my other blog posts that read: I forgot about the blue bible of DDD. Since Eric said it, it must be gospel. This comment was in response to another comment about the Eric Evans DDD book. I know that my comment was a bit harsh and will be taken way out of context by many. Sadly the ones that take it out of context will do so by defending the DDD book. Even though my comment was directly about that book, the spirit of it has nothing to do with that book or any other book, blog, etc. In fact I buy into the majority of the concepts in the book and actually like the book for its content. The point I was trying to make (yes I did a very, very poor job of it) was that simply reading something does not make it gospel...

Today my iPhone took a crap. I am not real sure what the issue was but all I know is it went to a white screen and I could not do anything about it. I was hoping that simply plugging it into the PC would solve the issue, but it did not. Because I did not know what to do and I did not want to screw around with it I figured I would do a reset to factory. I was completely prepared to lose all my data as it was mostly just apps and emails (hey, it is a phone after all) and I was pretty sure my contacts would be restored. What I was surprised to see what that after a restore via iTunes all my prior apps, contacts and music/data were put back. What really shocked me was that all my settings for each app were put back as well. I have to say that in...

I had a great time at the conference yesterday. I really appreciate everyone who attended our sessions as well as all the positive feedback. For those of you in other cities,Orlando was just the 2nd conference. The rest are still to come . For anyone interested in the materials from our sessions: MapDotNet (from the keynote) Don't forget this is free. jQuery WPF ToolKit Why You Should Go Yes, there are lots of presentations and great speakers, but in retrospect I really think these are secondary reasons. The highlight of the event is the under-advertised Community Courtyard . Community Courtyard is an Open Spaces -ish gathering facilitated by "Doc" List . No one seemed to know about this portion of the conference, but  thankfully...

My daughter is about 6 ½ years old. Her reading skills have blossomed in these last 6 months. It's been an amazing experience as a parent both contributing and merely witnessing her discovery of literacy. Programming is one of my passions, and I like to share my passions. Like watching a sunset, it's better when you are not alone. I've been kicking around ideas for teaching her how to program for a couple of years actually. I had a few concepts that I never got around too, but I abandoned them all when I heard about Boku . Boku is an iconic programming game for the Xbox. Microsoft announced it at PDC. It looks really cool, though I do have a slight hesitation about the iconic part. (I do so like words.) Tonight, just before...

The other day on Twitter Roy Osherove made the statement that he was teaching a class on TDD and he was showing how to use the various Isolation Frameworks. When I read this I had to ask if he talking about Mocking frameworks when he said Isolation frameworks. And indeed he was. As I sat back to reflect on the semantic differences between the terms Mocking and Isolation I had an 'ah-ha' moment. When we use the term Mocking we are talking about replacing the 'real' functionality with 'canned' functionality. Martin Fowler put it best in his Mock's aren't Stubs post Mocks are objects pre-programmed with expectations which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive. This definition works great...

I had a couple of requests for my slide deck. It's short and mostly pictures, but here it is . Additionally, the xaml-only font viewer is here . (You might want to do a right-click, save as). The binding example (old way vs. wpf way) is here . I want to thank everyone that came to my presentation. You were responsive and interactive, and I was energized by the session. I also want to thank the DevFish for pushing me to get more involved in these events. Some additional personal highlights from the event: Bill Reiss of Blue Rose Games did a session on developing games with XNA. Specifically, he demonstrated publishing the game to his Zune. Very cool. His Dr. Popper game will be among the community games on Xbox Live soon. It should be pretty...