In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence...

The Economics of the Design Process

I've been spending some very interesting time of late discussing agile and planned methodologies and our approach to software design with my mate Hubert in Oxford.   

Fortunately rather than recite it all here some of our discussion is featured in a paper Hubert recently presented at the ACCU Spring conference in the UK.

Worth a read perhaps.

Aspect-oriented programming?

As always I am the last to know ;-) when it comes to something rather smart - I was chatting to my dear open source mentor Hubert Matthews today and he said 'Have you heard of aspect programming? In the Java community there is a tool called AspectJ that does this"

Being honest as always I admitted my ignorance on both counts and he said i should look at this - has anyone tried implementing this technique yet with .NET.

A quick example of aspect-oriented programming would be 'logging' - imagine the need, especially when debugging to 'log-to-the-max' - now before everyone says just write a class and call it from each point, imagine an app that is HUGE.  Every point where we want to log we need to go and call this code, that sounds a bit laborious.  The AOP approach is to write the aspect and 'weave' it into all the places you require this as specified in the tool's configuration - i.e. every time we instantiate any object.

Now that is cool.  Do drop me a line or post if you are working on something like this or have seen something like this.

Thanks,

Ed

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Channel 9

I was at one of my internet communitiy offline get-togethers (Ecademy Trusted Business Network) last night and chatting to Julian Bond, their CTO.

He said "You're a Microsoft guy, have you heard of Channel 9?"

"No I replied" embarrassed but keen to know what on earth he is on about.

For anyone else who doesn't know it's rather interesting I dare say - take a peek!