Today was my last full time day on this contract. Tomorrow I start up full-time with another. Personally, I’ve gotten in the habit of looking a my past contract and conducting my own personal retrospective on what I learned or how I would do things differently. I figured that because my memory is getting worse in my old age, I’d started putting these things down on my blog.
For a greenfield project, don’t use the database someone hands off to you
As I was driving home today, I couldn’t help notice something. Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework is still in beta, and was only announced last October. To my knowledge, there are currently three projects in the Edmonton area based off this framework.
Castle Monorail has been around for much longer, three years or so? It’s still listed as a release candidate on it’s website, but I’d say Monorail is suitable for production. Currently, I am not aware of any projects in the Edmonton that are based off this framework.
*Note: I originally wrote this post on August 23, 2008. As things change with the book NHibernate in Action, I will be updating this post and resetting the date. *
I’d like to take a break from boring you two readers of my blog, and take a moment to annoy you with a rant. Diversity is the spice of life after all.
This little remonstration of mine is about the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Well, specifically just one book. I’ve got my eye on a couple of other books available with MEAP to see how they pan out before considering the whole “early access” useless. Anyway…
Well, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to get around to this: but I must say that there are now a couple of “must haves” in my web developer’s tool box. One of them is jQuery, and now the other is QUnit.
Chad Myers has a good, quick, post introducing QUnit, I’d strongly suggest checking it out if you do web development (which, IMHO, implies some use of JavaScript, right?). Chad’s post covers the basics pretty good, and I think I would just be duplicating/plagiarizing Chad’s work if I were to blog the hour or two I spent getting to know QUnit here.
At the last Edmonton Agile Methods User Group meeting, we had a brief discussion around code coverage, and what should be an acceptable number to shoot for. Is it okay when the unit tests cover 80% of the code? Or should 100% be the only acceptable value? After all, how can you be confident in your code knowing that 20% of it isn’t tested.
Allow me to go out on a limb here, and state with absolute certainty that the correct answer is “It depends on your situation”. Allow me to elaborate.
Last night (Thursday, June 26th) Rod Paddock gave a talk on using Silverlight 2.0 to the Edmonton .NET User Group. I’d say that Rod did a pretty good job, despite the fact that the beta of both Silverlight and Expression Blend didn’t exactly want to play nice all the time. It’s definitely perked my interest in the technology, and I can see a lot of business potential for it.
The rich user experience that Silverlight brings to the web-browser, will, I think raise the bar for what web applications will do for businesses. Forget all the buzz about ASP.NET MVC or MonoRail or ASP.NET 3.5. This is just another layer of makeup on the tired, old, hooker that is application development in .NET. Silverlight is what will make business users oh and ah and get excited about web apps again.
Wordy title. To wordy. Kind of like build files these days. I remember when I first discovered Ant, and then Nant*. I was pretty happy, as it allow a decent way to compile my Java (and C#) without using make files. Life was good as I could finally introduce some structure into HOW code was compiled. The build process was no longer using whatever “build” command the IDE exposed, hoping that I didn’t forget a compiler directive or a file or a reference to some other library along the way. Other programmers could also compile the code with out fear as well.
Jeremy Miller talking about the trials and tribulations of keeping a codebase viable and useful over the past four years. A lot of tips and explanations were backed with diagrams on the whiteboard. Kind of hard to blog that stuff, so this will probably be just a collection of bullets.
Lessons learned - a lot of them relate back to what are considered good, OO practices:
Brief discussion about where to start learning all these pattern. Advice is given to learn principles first (DRY, OCP, SRP, SOC, etc) as this will greatly help with the understanding and proper use of design patterns.
Two topics merged into one. Rod Paddock wants to talk about stored procs, and others want to learn how to explain NHibernate to other people who aren’t familiar with it (and minimize the jargon).
Rod uses a custom code-gen solution based heavily on sprocs - a data driven approach. Sounds like it works well for him. Oren concurs that this technique could be very effective in certain circumstances. It will have problems with complex situations that deal with convoluted/difficult data scenarios. He’s giving an example, but I just can’t keep up with him. The point of Oren’s story is that a domain driven approach will would better when you’re not dealing with data but with data and behavior.
Joe starts polling to see what people want to talk about. Most seem to be interest the libraries for Mono (being that they also work on Windows/.NET. So, Joe starts talking about libraries for/from Mono.
A short session, which isn’t bad. Gives me a chance to float around to check out some other things.
