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I have spent a lot of time through the night and some today to try to get my personal blog in order after the Mac options didn't pan out. We have a really important, large external release going out to two external banks next Friday but we stopped this week's Iteration to fix bugs that had been found. In XP, you don't keep going when you have bugs, you stop and fix them. VSTS/TFS TFS is still way too hard to install. The install that my experienced IT guy started last week finally got done last night and took him roughly 16 hours of work time to install including SQL Server 2005 Standard. That is still way too long. To "breadboard" TFS, I am putting in my Workflow Architectural Spikes. More later. Technorati Tags: .NET , VSTS , TFS , Team FoiFinancial and Banking , Extreme Programming , Agile , Agile Development , Workflow , K2 , Windows Workflow , Mocks Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Sitting here on Saturday morning with a nice cup of Kona coffee. There just is no better coffee in the world. Strong but deceivingly smooth. I really miss our former annual trips to the Big Island that we used to take with my Father-In-Law and family before he got ill. We used to go up in the hills and buy direct from the growers. Umm, nothing better. The coffee may actually help me get over my funk morning as there is now a lot going on my personal life but you know you never get to blog what really matters Agile/Extreme Programming/Tools While Steve was off having a baby , I went back into the team pairing full time for this Iteration rather than doing do the advance work on Workflow and stuff. It felt really good and of course it was a challenge for me, as many of the particulars of the system have changed since I last paired and I had to actually relies on my pair more. What floored me, even though it shouldn't at this point, is just how good this team has gotten. Every single person on the team could explain any place in the code at any time and we were able to evolve the design and code together. It still blows me away the power of pair programming BTW, we are working on our THIRD release of our Collateral Management tools and architecture to at least two Top 50 Banks! Ayende has released Rhino Mocks 3.0 , the premier Mocking solution on .NET IMHO He was also on .NET Rocks talking about NHibernate and Rhino Mocks Since he still had time after the last two somehow, he also put out an hour long screen cast about Rhino Mocks Jeremy is Code Complete on Structure Map 2.0 Financial and Banking Mike Walker announces the OBA Reference Application Pack for Loan Origination Systems (OR-Loss ). This is a lot of great stuff here Mike is also doing a Financial Services Unwrapped IV Webcast Workflow Paul Andrews blogs about the 3rd performance paper released for WF Sylvain blogs that K2 BlackPearl Beta 1 TR2 is available. BlackPearl is the version of K2.NET built on WF CLR/C# Read More...
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This is it, the big 150! The first New and Notable was on May 19, 2003 , (my first post was March 29, 2002 ) and I paid homage to the master, "I have always admired Mike's ability to look at the world out there and put it all into one great post, The Daily Grind . While I can't pretend to have Mike's writing ability, I would like to start moving to something similar instead of multiple seperate posts." I wish I had the discipline of Mike because if I posted daily I would be well towards 1000 instead of 150-) but hey I'm pretty proud of my record. I love this community and in the last 25 years this community (and Microsoft) have been real good to me and my family. I hope that what I have been picking here has been of good use to the community to keep you informed on key .NET activities as well as the architectural and design side. Thus, I go forth and pick: Entity Framework, ADO.NET 3, Orcas, MVP Summit One of the best writers in the community today is certainly Jeremy Miller . His latest post, MVP Summit Recapped: Linq for Entities, MonoRail, and Shameless Name Dropping , is a fine example of why. In one post, he is able to write quite elequently on complex subjects like the subtle design flaws in Entity Framework 3 and why WF 4 will rock your world. He is able to take a technology, stick to his design principles and stand his ground, educating and helping all involved achieve something better than was there before. He certainly wasn't the only one of us doing that but his post really captures the core design principles of no infrastructure code in business logic classes. Infrastructure is Infrastructure, business logic is business logic. We want the same thing: No marker interfaces, no codegen, no partial classes. Just plain "PO" and support for the Unit of Work pattern. David Laribee also talks on this area and makes clear that its a vision thing that doesn't really compare to NHibernate which is just OR/M; it's a full Read More...
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Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip , partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-). Agile/Development Tools On my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall. Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier. NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey. Speaking of NUnit, they also have a new release, NUnit 2.4 Release Candidate (2.4.0). The Release Notes are here and include some nice features: A new syntax and internal architecture for Asserts is being introduced in this release, based on the notion of constraints found in JMock and NMock. The Assert.That method is used to make an assertion based on a constraint Assert.That( actual, constraint, message, args ); Assert.That( actual, constraint, message ); Assert.That( actual, constraint ); The constraint argument may be specified directly using one of the built-in constraint classes or a user-defined class. It may also be specified using one of the syntax helpers provided as static methods of the Is class, such as Is.Null Is.Empty Is.EqualTo( object ) Is.CollectionContaining( object ) Is.SubsetOf( collection ) SCSF is one of the most visible Microsoft projects being done in an Agile way. They are crazy as us doing one week Iterations. Blaine has some reflections on Iteration 3 . CB brother, Jeremy asks what OSS tools are you using in development? As I answered there, they include: NUnit CruiseControl.Net FitNesseDotNet RhinoMocks Subversion TortoiseSVN Ankh Wiki Speaking of tools. my good buddy Tomas (see you next week!) has a nice list of Text Editors One of the things Raymond and I discussed in Oklahoma was Read More...
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I must apologize to my very good friend Jim Shore who I was supposed to put a blog post up for quite a while ago and I spaced it in the frenzy of two projects I am in now. As you might remember, Jim came on my team and really built the team up into the super team they are now. He is a master of Extreme Programming, that's right I said XP, not "Agile," and I am thrilled that he is developing a must-read book on Extreme Programming . They are looking for reviewers so pitch in especially if you do NOT have a lot of experience with XP: " I'm very proud to announce that chromatic and I are writing a book called The Art of Agile Development . It will be published by O'Reilly in 2007. Our aim is to make an intensely practical book that shows mainstream development teams how to adopt, use, and ultimately master the art of agile software development. See the preface for more. We are currently writing the draft manuscript and we'd like you to be part of the review process. If you'd like to help out, great! Read the sections linked below and send your comments to the art-of-agile mailing list . We provide a list of questions with each section for you to focus on as you review. We eagerly read every review, although we usually don't respond unless we have questions ." Technorati Tags: Extreme Programming , Agile , Agile Development , Books Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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So, I have been writing a bunch of posts over the last 14 months, how we have been using Agile, actually full Extreme Programming practices to build a multi-million dollar Enterprise Software platform and application for the banking sector. We certainly have seriously stressed Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to their limits as this is not a small piece of software, but a large Enterprise solution that gets sold into the top banks in the world. We certainly have proven that you can use Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to build a 1.8 million dollar Enterprise product family. have talked about being an Agile Architect and why it's neccessary, how we went to CTP in July , the Process we use, our tools , and even our failings . So, after 48 Iterations we finished all the functionality we had agreed with Business was necessary for a "Phase I" delivery of our Next Generation/V5.0 product, as our Next Generation architecture will span an ambitious set of goals and products on top of this platform. Business and Development agreed together that we would stop and start a three week Iteration of fixing bugs in our backlog, testing and eating our dog food. In Extreme Programming, you are really not supposed to carry over bugs out of the Iteration but this was extremely hard with one week Iterations. We turned out very well overall as all the testing found just over 100 total bugs for 14 months work which is an order of magnitude less bugs than our previous product development techniques. In addition, we have over 1,000 unit tests and the code is well factored, clean and maintanable. The best part is the whole team understands it, not individuals. I actually haven't written about it but I have been working as Agile Architect the last few months on the next phase and not as part of the Iterations directly. These involve a whole lot of Workflow, Reporting and much more. Anyhow, I made a stand with my management the last 3 weeks and insisted that I code and Read More...
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Family morning at the Gentiles means the whole family watching Radiohead from 1994 while waiting for the Starbucks to come... Software Development Ayende points to this great list Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money and asks what excites you as a developer? As I said in a Retrospective last night, its not about money for me or just a job (expressed as "Build Something That Matters"). If I can't have the passion for my project, my career as a Software Architect, taking the responsibility for my own career, than I need to find something else to do because this is far from the least stressful job out there. You had better be in it because you love it and love to create and ship stuff that delights customers. Otherwise I can go weave baskets out in New Mexico... Data/OR/M/Software Architecture Jeff Palermo notes that we'll see Microsoft's OR/M soon and I can't help thinking BFD and its about time. After years of misleading developers that Stored Procs and database-driven architectures and apps were the only way , is too late? Many of us who have been doing this for a while and come out of other environments are already way ahead using Wilson OR/M, NHibernate, LBLgen and others. And everyone gushes "oh, ah, LINQ is so cool!...... I really like my friend Peter's piece Specifications are Like Object-Oriented Messages . A must-read! Avaon/WPF XamlPadX Updated! Vista Tim Sneath has Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes Technorati Tags: Software Development , Data , OR/M , LINQ , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I am still reeling from seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Mars Volta 2 nights ago in Philly at the Wachovia Center. The Peppers were beyond grea t with Frusciante taking a very active lead role. Many of the songs contained a full-out Hendrix-type feedback solo in it that showed the depth of his talents. I think Stadium Arcadium is their best album since Blood, Sex, Magic (which they pulled out the title song the other night!!). You can't beat a start of Can't Stop-> Dani California! Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands (although hard to take at times) and I am listening to the brilliant new Ampheture right now which they played in full the other night. Live, they come off as a wall of sonic noise and Bixler-Zavala wailing singing, an assault on the senses that drove people nuts (my wife wanted to leave!) and their greatness only came through in sporadic moments (Viscera Eyes). Okay, a lot of stuff today. Number one, I want to congratulate my good friend and master of these types of posts, Mike Gunderloy for hitting The Daily Grind 1000 !! Mike is an incredible asset to the community and a terrific writer to boot. If you are one of the rare people not already subscribed, get your ass over there this minute and make it so! I have started to write (for work) a Workflow XOML loader and executor. I want to do something like XamlPad or even Snippet Compiler to execute my workflows. I have the hosting of the runtime down and loading the XAML/XOML. More later. WCF/SOA/Indigo/BizTalk/Workflow/Distributed .NET Another good friend of mine, Tomas Restepo. has some great stuff: He released his MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation. He addresses MsmqListenerService concerns with the above Gets answers for the question of how to get the SOAP Action associated with a given operation when all you have is the OperationDescription for it Points to Ralph Squillace s post an walkthrough entry of how metadata publication (MEX + WSDL) is enabled in Windows Communication Read More...
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