Gojko Adzic

This may be a bit on short notice, but we are organising a follow-up to the Castle talk from a few weeks ago on the 12th. The talk will be focused on Developing Ajax Web applications with Castle Monorail and the best practices for developing web 2.0 applications with Castle. The talk will take place in Skills Matter offices on the 12th of June — participation is free but you’ll have to register upfront. See Skills Matter page on the event for more details.

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms. Continue Reading »

Misunderstandings caused by wrong assumptions or supposedly self-evident knowledge are, in my opinion, among the biggest obstacles to great software. Developers and business people can have a great time talking to each other, agree on everything and still understand two completely different things. Problems like that will not cause a project to get cancelled, the stuff that gets delivered may work, but its going to fall short of doing the right thing. Instead of being great, the result is just going to be mediocre and it will need rework so that the clients can really use it. One of the worst examples of how people can agree on everything and still make a major mistake does not come from software at all — it can be heard on a river boat trip. Continue Reading »

It was a great pleasure to do the talk on Agile Web Development with the Castle Project tonight at Skills Matter — judging by the number of people that turned up, this is a very interesting topic and I’m sorry that we did not get through the entire thing (thanks to London underground for delaying everything with their famous signaling problems). If you were at the presentation, and are interested in attending one more talk on Windsor or Ajax Monorail capabilities, please drop an e-mail to people at Skills Matter and ask for another session, I’d be more than happy to do it.

The recording of the session should be online soon at the Skills Matter site. Meanwhile, here are the slides and some links that you might want to visit next:

• powerpoint slides from the presentation
• Castle project homepage
• Page controller pattern explanation from MSDN
• Velocity template engine language guide
• Castle demo application #2: Monorail basics
• Castle demo application #1: ActiveRecord basics

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Marisa Seal and I will jointly be presenting a session on Effective Test Driven Database Development at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Our session is scheduled for the afternoon on August 7th.

We’ll talk about the reasons why TDD is not as common in the database world as it is in Object languages, and present solutions and best practices for test-driven database development. We look at database testing from two aspects: unit-testing in the database (stored procedures, views) and integration testing from the OO service/web layer down to the database. We’ll also talk about DbFit and how that tool helps us build better database applications and integrate better with the databases.

For an early preview of the talk, come to Skills Matter in London on June 26th. I’ll be doing one of those free evening talks focused on a lot of the same topics as the Agile2008 talk.