I’m currently in London for the QCon developer conference.  Over the last few days I’ve attended two half days of tutorials and Day 1 of the conference proper is just wrapping up now.  It’s been a really enjoyable conference so far and everyone I’ve talked to has been really friendly, plus it’s been great to meet... Read more

It’s useful to take time to reflect on why you do the things you do. Today I took a little of that time and decided to look once again at the original post that Dave Laribee wrote when coining the term Alt.Net. It’s a great reminder of what Alt.Net is all about and why I’m involved... Read more

Over recent times there’s been a slowly growing number of people interested in software craftsmanship and just recently those people published a manifesto to explain their ideals(http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/).  The manifesto is based on the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/) and simply takes the values of the agile manifesto and adds riders to them. I’ve been mulling this whole craftsmanship... Read more

The first Oz Alt.Net virtual meeting happened tonight and I found it really enjoyable.  It was great to have a lot of conversation and chit chat happening between the attendees, and fantastic to see people from all across the country being able to talk with each other.  It really surprised me just how quickly the time... Read more

This Monday (March 2nd) we are having our first Australian Virtual Alt.Net meeting. The starting time is 9:30 PM eastern so that we can have the Perth people involved as well and make it an Australia wide thing, not just be an east coast thing. Details are on the http://ozalt.net site.  I hope to see you... Read more

So apparently we’re meant to be getting support for code contracts in .NET 4.0 which is great.  But why wait until then when you can go to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/ and grab it for VS2008 now :-) Why code contracts? “So, what’s the big deal with code contracts?” you might ask.  How are contracts different to just a... Read more

Normally when people talk about aspect oriented programming (AOP) and try and provide a sample they typically talk about logging.  It’s the easiest example for most people to get their head around and it usually involves minimal code.  They might also talk about (but not show) how aspects can be used for security and “so much... Read more

One of the recommended practices when doing agile software development is to get estimates from each of the individuals in the team without having them influence each others thinking.  That way you get multiple points of view on an item and avoid the issues of having one person estimate on behalf of everyone else in the... Read more

If you look around the internet you’ll find lots of information on refactoring your code, making it more testable, improving its maintainability, and using DI/IoC techniques to increase the ease in which you can make changes to it.  A very large element in all these subjects is having code that is loosely coupled and learning how... Read more

A few weeks ago my old desktop passed away in the heat and I decided to get a replacement.  I considered doing a build-your-own or looking for a greybox or Dell that would suit my desires, but building my own just doesn’t appeal to me anymore, and nothing else really inspired me to hand over the... Read more

You may have noticed that I’ve done a bit of a visual refresh on the blog.  The old theme was getting a little long in the tooth, so I went hunting and found a new template to run with (details in the footer).  I think this one looks much better than the old and it only... Read more

I’ve just finished having a read through of “Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build” from MSPress.  I was kind of wondering if there’d be any book left by the time I finished reading the title! Thankfully there was.  The book is broken into two main sections – the first dealing with... Read more

Let’s just say, for arguments sake, that you’ve run across a piece of code that is tightly coupled, i.e. there are lots of hard links between classes, it’s hard to test, changes are difficult, the code breaks when it shouldn’t, etc.  Let’s also say, for arguments sake, that you want to improve the design of that... Read more

Zach has kindly volunteered me to host the Virtual Alt.Net meeting this week while Chad is away, so if you’ve got anything you’d like to see discussed then get in touch or just join the meeting and call it out once we’re going. The LiveMeeting URL is http://snipr.com/9wurv and it gets underway at 2pm Sydney time.... Read more

The URL for the Sydney Alt.Net group has just changed.  It’s now http://sydney.ozalt.net (the old address will redirect). This is because we now have an Australian Alt.Net community at http://ozalt.net with new groups starting in Brisbane and Perth over the next month or so and it’s about time the Aussie’s had an Alt.Net presence of their... Read more

I spent a decent amount of time working with PostgreSQL some years ago and thought at the time that the concept of databases that could store objects was fantastic.  None of that object relational impedance mismatch hoo-hah – just save an object, retrieve an object, etc.  Unfortunately reality wasn’t so great - the tooling around reporting... Read more

James & Martin are running a survey trying to get a feel for how Scrum is being dong within Australia. The more responses the better, so head on over and give it a run through.  It’ll take you all of 5 minutes, if that. Read more

The Waterfall Development model is something we all know and loathe.  Thankfully in recent years we’re seeing the industry slowly turning away from this model and moving back to the iterative development models used in the 1950’s, before the rise of waterfall.   What’s ironic about waterfall development is that it’s creator (Winston Royce) never actually intended... Read more

Exception management.  Ah, the two words that can so easily send shivers up the backs of many developers.  And they are what they are, right?  Wrap things in a try/catch and go from there. Well, Michael Feathers has just posted a blog entry on a slightly different approach to exceptions for those times where you want... Read more

DataDude, or as it’s more formally known – Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR (*phew*) has been released for a few weeks now and I spent part of today showing a number of people how it all fits together. By the way, if you already have the 2005 edition installed, go get this version... Read more