MVP Summit - Code Slam - GotDotNet Workspaces, Ward Cunningham and BlogML
Last night, the CodeSlam event took place at the Microsoft Company Store / Visitor Center (organized by Korby Parnell). The list of .NET developer celebrities was impressive and too numerous to mention! The purpose of the event was to evangelize the great things already happening and coming up in the GotDotNet Workspaces. Microsoft is taking online collaborative development seriously and there are exciting things on their way! (wish I could say more...)
I was lucky to spend some time at the event with Ward Cunningham, Daniel Cazzulino and Pete Coupland. Ward was especially interested in thycotic's TDD activities and how we are applying the principles to small and medium size businesses on an hourly billable basis. We also talked about our techniques for applying TDD to databases - such as our DatabaseInitializer in the Thycotic.TddStarterKit and the DatabaseScripter. Ward mentioned how pieces of Extreme Programming are slowly making their way into various groups within Microsoft. We talked about how tough the sell can be to clients and best strategies for marketing TDD and Pair Programming to clients. Unfortunately this marketing so often depends on developers who are stereotypically weak with such skills.
There was a strong Australian contingent at the event (mostly from readify, I think), with most of the guys running on fumes after 20+ hours of travel. I met Darren Niemke and Paul Glavich for the first time. Darren showed me his BlogML project (which is already on GotDotNet's CodeGallery!). The project is a great idea - basically a way to import and export an entire blog. It defines a standard format (BlogML) for serializing a blog (including comments, images, attachments) into an XML format. This obviously has important implications for migrating blogs from one blogging platform to another but could go further by making other things easier, such as: cross posting, offline viewing and further smart ways of distributing content for syndication. There is a pet project at thycotic, to build a decent offline blog reader for the PocketPC (believe it or not, the ones available - that we have found - all depend on online capabilities!) - BlogML has great potential for this project since it provides an easy way to serialize a blog for offline viewing.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of thycotic, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Our product, myclockwatcher.com is a time and expense tracking system specialized for billable professionals built on ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server using Test Driven Development.