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Austin .NET Code Camp re-cap

May 8, 2007 The Austin .NET User Group put on another fantastic Code Camp this past weekend. I was especially proud to see 3 members of our staff presenting. You guys rocked. Kevin Miller launched a potential new career as a public speaker/presenter with a well-received talk on Monorail. The attendees were very excited about what they saw. And kudos to Kevin for coding on the fly, which flowed well and showed his confidence in his knowledge and abilities. Coding on the fly takes some stones. Bret Pettichord did a talk on Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby. The participants had lab machines and were able to actually script tests. It was the only hands-on talk that I saw, and I heard  lots of good feedback from the attendees. Scott Bellware filled the big room for his talk on Good Test, Better Code - From Unit Testing to Behavior-Driven Design. He…

My t_head t_hurts from t_looking at t_this t_code

While working on one of our legacy products today, I ran head first into this code: Set cl_list = Cobj_LOR_CLAUSE.Contents For t_int = cl_list.Count - 1 To 0 Step -1 Set cl_rec = cl_list.ItemByIndex(t_int) If cl_rec.GetField("parameterized") = 1 Then t_str = "XYZZYParamXYZZY#" & Trim$(Str$(t_int)) t_pos = 1 While t_pos > 0 t_pos = Instr(sql_stmt, t_str) If t_pos > 0 Then If Left$(cl_rec.GetField("operation"), 3) = "is " And _ Instr(cl_rec.GetField("operation"), "equal")

Monorail Introduced

May 7, 2007 The deed is done. My Code Camp talk is over. It was a great experience working on my public speaking and polishing my understanding of Monorail. My talk had 2 parts. An introduction, that needs a lot of polish, and a coding exercise where I go from an empty project to a working example complete with activerecord data model. A lot of great questions were asked. All in all it really jazzed me to have the opportunity to get the word out about the great work being done on this project and to see so many people get excited about possibilities that Monorail brings to web applications development on the .Net platform. Getting comfortable with Monorail As I promised during my talk here is a yummy collection of links to get you going. First off some introductory material to get you excited about Monorail: Colin Ramsay's has a…

Ruby Imports Agility Into Microsoft

May 1, 2007 As more details are flowing out of Mix07, the .Net world is a-buzz with dreams of Ruby On Rails and the dynamic goodness that can be hosted on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). I too am excited but for another reason entirely. Microsoft is showing signs of finally doing an Agile process right. include 'Agility' John Lam and the DLR team after exiting their quiet period have announced iterative code releases. From John's - Introducing IronRuby post: Finally, I apologize for being silent about what we've been doing in this space. But this is now full disclosure - so we will be working with the community in a fully open fashion from this point onwards. IronPython has a 3 week release cycle with a live repository (you'll be able to get changes the moment we check them in), and we're going to try…

Windsor Container Property Setter Injection

April 30, 2007     Hammet pointed out in the comments for Creating a simple Windsor facility that the whole premise of my TimeServiceFacility is silly.   Sorry, but I still don't get it why you used a facility to do that. You could get the same behavior by   - registering the timeservice as, well, a service - having writable properties on components, like you do on HasTimeServiceProperty class.   it will be "injected" in the same way.   Interesting exercise, though.   This post is an attempt to correct a wrong. Windsor will do Property setter injection out of the box. Just follow what Hammet said to do a viola you get the same thing.   Add the TimeService as service component to the container:   Container.Current.AddComponent('timeservice', typeof(ITimeService), typeof(TimeService)); Here is a test that proves setter injection is working for components resolved from the container…

Real blogs are written by real people

April 29, 2007 Sara Smith from ViaMetric has an interesting post titled A blog is not a brochure. Amen! (Full Disclosure: ViaMetric does some marketing work for us) My favorite line from her post: [Blogs are] your chance to show your customers that your company is run by actual living, breathing humans who like to think about things, and sometimes even write about them  She hits the nail on the head with this one. And it's so easy to tell when a blog is written by an actual human, speaking in their own voice, wanting to engage in a conversation, wanting to share information. Those are the blogs I connect with. Because you're connecting with a person. Not a sales or a marketing message. Sara goes on to say: For a great example of how it can be done, check out the blogs written by…

My Google apps get a style makeover

A cleaner, more functional GMail I use GMail for my personal email, and functionally it's great, but I always thought it could use some help in its look and feel. Even the new beta of Hotmail has a nicer look. Not any more. Lifehacker recently rolled up multiple gmail enhancements and styling into one package: Better Gmail. I love the Super Clean skin, and the Conversation Preview option is sweet - simply right-click on a message to preview its content in a popup bubble.   Goodbye Newsgator, Hello Google Reader I've played with Google Reader here and there, but the look and feel of Newsgator Online kept me with Newsgator. However, using the Stylish extension, with the Google Reader theme, makes for a much nicer looking Google Reader. This was the final straw that pushed me to move away from…

ADO.NET Entity Framework cut from .NET 3.5/Orcas

Kevin Miller recently blogged about the recent confirmation that the EDM Designer will not be in Orcas. Yesterday, the ADO.NET team reported that the ADO.NET Entity Framework will not be in the RTM of Orcas, but should ship in the first half of 2008. When I hear "first half of 2008", I interpret that as June 30, 2008. Microsoft shipped the first CTP of the ADO.NET Entity Framework in August of 2006. That means it will be almost two years from the first CTP to a release. Two years! Unreal. Frans Bouma has some interesting thoughts as the underlying reasons. Our decision to switch to ActiveRecord and nHibernate has been clearly solidified.

The Troubled Future of IT

Static image April 27, 2007 Gartner at its annual Symposium/ITxpo this week in San Francisco has presented a number of messages to the IT profession, with few holds barred.   Gartner analyst Steve Prentice said it most bluntly: “Now is not the time for complacency or mediocrity [...] This industry is in danger of becoming one of failure. We’ve come to accept mediocrity as the norm. It’s not a lack of technology or skills. The problem comes down to a lack of vision.”   This message as reported by Larry Dignan says that technology managers are essentially paralyzed, waiting for software vendors to roll out the next upgrade, and no longer capable of leading their company’s development future innovatively.   “Technology managers are mired in mediocrity, wait for technology vendors to innovate and fear being a first mover. The result: The U.S. doesn’t innovate and CIOs risk…