Nov
26
2008
Jason Gorman announced the first Software Craftsmanship conference, which will take place in London on the 26th of February 2009. The conference is about the “hard skills” that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software. Judging by the first few session proposals it is going to be an event that people serious about software cannot afford to miss. For more information, see the conference web site.
Nov
14
2008
CloudCamp returned to London yesterday, organised with the help of Skills Matter at the Crypt on the Clarkenwell green. The main topics of this cloud/grid computing community meeting were service-level agreements, connecting private and public clouds and standardisation issues. Continue Reading »
Nov
13
2008
Solomon Rutzky wrote a nice article on DbFit for SQLServer Central. The article focuses on the use of DbFit for database unit testing for SQL Server.
Read the full article SQLServer Central.
Nov
12
2008
One of the key things missing from a lot of places where people try to implement agile acceptance testing is working collaboratively on examples. Although this sounds as a minor issue, in fact it is one of the core practices. If it is missing, there is no way to get the full benefits of acceptance testing and teams often get disillusioned with the whole idea. Ian Cooper recently wrote about his experiences before and after introducing the workshop, concluding that “this seems to have removed a lot of the pain”. Continue Reading »
Nov
11
2008
I just got the e-mail that my proposal for a session on Enterprise .NET Development with Opensource .NET tools was accepted for the Software practice advancement 2009 conference. The conference will take place in London in April 2009.
This session will be presented as an experience report from several enteprise .NET projects I have been involved in over the course of the last two years, which all included extensive use of opensource tools. Most of the innovation today in software happens in the opensource community and it is driven by opensource tools, but the attitude of software companies in the .NET market towards opensource tools is a lot worse then in the Java world. Using opensource tools on .NET project allows us to harness the innovation years before equivalent commercial tools appear. It also causes a lot more political and personal opposition, from lawyers that are concerned about licensing to contractors who refuse to do it because “it’s not .NET”. In this session, I will present the benefits that my teams got from the Castle project stack, NServiceBus, NHibernate and the like, what problems we faced on the way, how we solved them, how to shorten the learning curve for people with a more traditional .NET background and how to convince managers and lawyers that this is not a danger for them.