Tales from a Trading Desk

Moving to WordPress

mdavey — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:27:00 GMT

If WordPress is good enough for Scobleizer, then its probably worth the move. I'm over here now.

Business Cards

mdavey — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:08:00 GMT

Since Finetix is currently re-designing their business cards, maybe they should get Scobleizer involved in the process :)

Microsoft doesn't get TDD

mdavey — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:04:00 GMT

Via Sam.

Orcas - Visual Studio 2007

mdavey — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:20:00 GMT

Blogged by Somasegar who runs Microsoft's Developer Division.

Must Read MSDN Magazine Articles

mdavey — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 08:34:00 GMT

The last few issues of MSDN Magazine have had a number of excellent articles that in my view are must reads for all .NET developers

.NET 2.0 CAS - software engineers never know enough about security
SUPERASSERT - When John writes, everyone should read
Impact of Low-Lock Techniques - Did you know that .NET 2.0 has a different memory model to the ECMA memory model?
Reliability Features - CLR hosting, ICLRPolicyManager, Safe Handles...
Performance Pitfalls - always worth a re-read, especially when Joel admits Microsoft made a bad design decision.
SpinWaitLock - Jeffrey on concurrency.
OpenMP - C++ land. Also worth viewing the PDC C++: Future Directions in Language Innovation presentation.
Transaction on your class variables - very cool

Eurekster blog on swicki

Skinkers

mdavey — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 09:31:00 GMT

I see that the BBC and XBox both use Skinkers, and now the sports betting industry is beginning to use the software. Wonder if any investment banks use it? - London Stock Exchange uses it for internal communication.

Sam's War Room

mdavey — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 08:26:00 GMT

Sam's been blogging about his pure agile team recently. This weekend he posts about his War Room.

Another Sprint, Another Release - we're on the Grid

mdavey — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 07:03:00 GMT

Yesterday saw the end of another sprint, and a milestone for the current project. We finally managed to get the Informix drivers installed on the UAT grid, followed by a release of the pricing service. This was a major step forwards - it feels like we are on the home straight now. Moving from a custom in-house cluster environment to a commercial grid application has been "interesting" - possible the most diplomatic word I could use. Its been challenging to migrating the C++ codebase together with the replacement of specific services to Java.

Microsoft admits .Net skills shortage

mdavey — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 12:42:00 GMT

Sorry but Mark Quirk at Microsoft is behind the times on this one. From what I have seen, there has been a shortage of .NET software engineers for the last few years, and it's not getting any better. I suggested a long time ago that Finetix should begin to train .NET developers, since our clients appear to have an appetite for these resources. I'd also point out that paired programming has a lot of advantages in the training/knowledge transfer arena.

Rally finally starts blogging agile

mdavey — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:06:00 GMT

Here