Gojko Adzic

Earler this year I published my first book, Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse. Instead of working with an established publisher, I decided to self-publish the book using a print-on-demand service. The journey to get the book from the early concept to a printed copy that someone can buy from Amazon was, without a doubt, at the same time one of the most exhausting and one of the most fulfilling experiences in my career. Here is what I’ve learned from it. Continue Reading »

Last month, I took a short break from my computer and went on a holiday. When I came back I was surprised to find that, while I was on the beach, Google sent quite a few people looking for underground Korean adult movies to my web log. I don’t know what is so special about the Korean illegal film industry, but considering that they also eat dogs there, it must be something very interesting to watch. I guess that you can find anything on Internet these days, but why were they looking for it on my web site? The answer to that question turned out to be another great example of why inputs should be sanitised no matter how unimportant. Continue Reading »

One of the best things about Castle Monorail MVC engine is that it allows us to test controllers from the IDE, without actually deploying anything to the web server. A major problem with most web development environments, including classic ASP.NET, is that the workflow and session logic can only be tested through the UI. User interface testing is slow, pain to maintain and generally does not pay off as much as code unit tests do. Monorail’s programming model allows us to test workflow and session logic from the code, leaving only the actual rendering outside the reach of unit tests. That is how Monorail empowers us to really apply agile principles to web development, and saves us even more time and effort. Continue Reading »

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 »