Low Country Software Ramblings

Do two posts in a day  make up for missing Tuesday?

.NET

Brad Abrams points to a study about the savings achieved by ClickOnce deployment…$36,500. From the Microsoft Internal HR Application department.

Agile

An interesting article about Lockheed Martin using an Agile approach for the new F-35 jet.  Talk about a Scrum of Scrums…

A podcast with Jim Trott and Alan Shalloway about the value of Lean-Agile development.

Community

Larry O’Brien has prior art for a dubious patent: “Hyperlinking from a CD to the web”.  I suspect PubPat would welcome his help.

Scott Bellware has a plan for Microsoft…if he was king for a day.

Design

Uncle Bob ponders Coding Styles. They are a good thing, but it should just be about style, not content. Consistency should rule.  The problem I run into is that I use about 6 different IDEs (Visual Studio Classic, 2005, VB 6.0, 3 flavors of embedded IDE).  I would love having 1 editor, customize it, have the macros setup for comments & auto-styling. Ever tried to use slackEdit to do VB 6.0?

Tim Ottinger has an intro to auto_ptr and Single ownership in C++.  Good stuff…if only our C++ code was VC 8 vintage…

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Nice spring day…what am I doing inside?

Career

PierG points out that when becoming the boss, you have to change what you’re doing and learn what you need to.

Rob has the highlights of the latest Dice Local Job Market Report.  And Beaufort didn’t make it on the list! I’m shocked!

Tim Ottinger points out that if you coach people, you shouldn’t slap them.

Community

Scott Bellware has just about had it with Vista and he takes it out on “a herd of self-interested old farts pissing on the same piece of ground”. I think I’ll hold on to XP a while longer…or make sure Vista can run VMWare Workstation…

If you want to hear Larry O’Brien, listen to the DeveloperWorks podcast about the Jolt Awards (via Larry’s Blog).
Design

Tim O. has an interesting entry on code being a liability instead of an asset.  Striking the right  balance between soluble (as per Scott B.) and too dense is tricky.

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I’ve been working for close to 15 years. Roughly 10 of those years were spent programming.  As I get older, I’m starting to look around and wonder: Is programming a young man’s game?  Back in the 90s, most of my colleagues were in their 20s or early 30s.  Is it still the case?  If I were to walk around a large development organization, would the median age still be what it was 10 years ago?  An unfortunate side effect of living where I do and working at a small company is that I don’t have visibility into other organizations.

Am I aging myself out of future employability?  As I’m busy working on embedded stuff, I don’t have time to keep up with the .NET stuff that I really like:  No time for WPF, Silverlight, WCF, LINQ, even ASP.NET (which I should really learn).  Do I have what it takes to keep up with the young whipper snappers out there?  Only time will tell… But this old dog likes to learn new tricks!

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Monday, Monday….

.NET

Scott Hanselman talks about tools he uses to compare binary .NET assemblies. Great to figure out what changed without doing a source diff.

Chris Sells is collecting the best online resources for WPF. If you have a good one, go see him.

Community

Sam Gentile vents against the lack of Vista power-user edition. he had to go a tweak his new machine endlessly to display extensions, avoid all the modal pop-ups, copy files(?!), etc…

Sam has also put out New and Notable 157. Interesting links on Agile and also RESTful design.

Scott Bellware has a good piece on Marie Antoinette’s take to the software maintenance mantra of “read the code“. Code should be easy to read and communicate the intent.  I find myself struggling with that sentiment versus the actual pressure of delivering a deeply embedded system in a short time frame.  Sometimes, I long leave embedded behind and luxuriate in the plush .NET environment of VS 2005.
Design

Larry O’Brien talks about the lessons history holds that could be applied toward the looming parallel processing crisis.

The prolific Scott has an entry on Test-Driven Architecture. I’m thinking it is complimentary with Roy Osherove’s Testable Object Oriented Programming.
Testing

Scott Bellware talks about how the organization of their unit tests has changed. They used to have 2 projects: fast tests (aka unit tests) and slow tests (aka integration tests). No more!

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Slow news today…Reaching back through time.

Testing

BJ Rollison answers the question: Is Testing responsible for Quality? The short answer: No!

BJ also has an older entry on the Future of Testing, and how testers seem to still be undervalued in the industry. One reader thinks this is a gross generalization.

Micahel has an interesting entry titled “Can Developers Test?” in which he explores dichotomy between Developer Tests (a la TDD) and the Tester Mindset. A developer’s test answers “How can I make my code work?”, while a good tester answers “How can I find all the places and scenarios where my developer’s code does not work?”. This rings very true to me, so does his assertion that switching back and forth between the two mindsets is extremely hard.

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