Low Country Software Ramblings

Deadlines, Deadlines everywhere…

Agile

Simon Baker points out that a group of people working together is not necessarily a team.  A team is a most rare commodity that must be nurtured.

Marco Abis points out what he thinks is the greatest contribution Agile has made to the development community.  It’s not technical, process related or organizational…
Community

Scott Hanselman points out that Firefox is not compliant to RFC2818.  I wonder if today’s upgrade to 2.0.0.3 fixes that (not that I have a personal use for RFC2818)

Adam Goucher point to a presentation by VIM’s benevolent dictator Bram Moolenaar about the 7 Habits for effective text editing.

Rob Walling has a great post on How to become a programmer. His advice is good, regardless of your level of experience.
Design

Dean Wampler talks about attending the Aspect-Oriented Software Development Conference. Aspects are something that got mild press coverage in recent times, but until a breakthrough occurs, I tend to agree with Dean that it will remain a niche technology.
Tim Ottinger talks about the only three meaningful numbers in software design: 0, 1 and many.   He also has a follow up post about One.

No Comments »

St-Patrick’s Day is this week-end…Get your green beer ready!

Agile

Pete Behrens tells of his experience transitioning a company to Agile in a big way.  They went “all in” as the poker analogy goes.

Design

IanG is ranting about the poor design of pop-up windows who steal focus away from you. I sympathize with him entirely, as this has caused me heartburn in the past.

Patrick Smacchia has an interesting article about avoiding dependencies in your .NET components.  Well worth a look.

Cory Foy points out there is a C# Design Patterns Group and they are holding a contest on the Decorator Pattern.  Have a look, fame (if not fortune) might await the winner!  Dang…another mailing list to subscribe to?!
Ted Graham has a good example of a realistic log4net config file.  As we use log4net in one of our program, this came in handy! (via The Daily Grind)
Community

Resharper 3.0 EAP is available.  This is one of the tools that I find invaluable (via The Daily Grind).

Jeremy Miller make a good point that even if your primary business is .NET, you shouldn’t be so blind or arrogant as to not look around at other languages.  This applies regardless of what you’re doing  (like C, C++, assembler, C#, VB…) (via Sam Gentile)

No Comments »

Of hackers and mere mortals…

Agile

Mary & Tom Poppendieck have an interview over at InfoQ about applying Lean manufacturing concepts to software development.

Maris Fogels brings up a potential parallel between software and subway lines.  When doing work with a large amount of uncertainty, civil engineering firms tend to use a cost-plus contract.  Software tends to be fixed-priced bids, even though there is a large amount of uncertainty.  Why not use cost-plus?
Community

Scott Bellware is looking for .NET Developers at Dovetail in Austin. XP/Scrum, .NET 3.0, even Orcas! Man that looks like it would be fun!

Larry O’Brien has been hacked and he’s mad. If he is done in by a Rootkit, what hope do the rest of us have?

Development

JD Meier shows you how to structure your Team System Foundation Server. The problem we run into (which is not an issue with .NET languages) is where to put the C++ include files. This post is silent on the matter. (via Brad Abrams)

Brian Button has a nifty powershell script which will convert RTF files to text files (or any other format Word supports). Powershell is awesome!

A new blog by Jeff Brown, a fellow native of the Ottawa Region.  Jeff is heavily involved with MbUnit, but his blog promises to be wider ranging…”I’d love to eat Monads for breakfast but Haskell O’s and .Net Flakes go together like milk and orange juice (at least when consumed at the office)” (thanks to Andrew Stopford)

No Comments »

The integration I do now has nothing to do with the integration I did in college. Calculus was easier…
Agile

Mike Cohn, author of Agile Estimating and Planning, was interviewed by Dina Henry-Scott of Controlling Chaos. Get it here.

Test-Driven Development

Roy Osherove puts a new twist on the age-old practice of code reviews: Test Reviews. He asserts it is actually easier to find logic errors by reviewing the tests.

TestDriven.NET 2.4 Beta is available. With support for NUnit 2.4 RC2. (via The Daily Grind)
Embedded

Some tidbits from Jack Ganssle’s newsletter. DO subscribe!

The Embedded System Conference will be in San Jose, April 1-5. On the menu: the teardown of a Toyota Prius, Al Gore as the keynote speaker, Orange County Chopper in attendance (will Mikey be there?)

Ralf Holly wrote an interesting article on Compile Time Assertions for Doctor Dobb’s Journal. It’s an oldie but a goodie!

Intel, the company that launched the embedded systems industry with their four-bit 4004 in 1971, has announced the end-of-life for most of their embedded processors. The MCS51, MCS251, MCS96, 80X18X, 80X386, 80X486, and i960 will no longer be available. Last buy is March 30, 2007, with final shipments made by September 28.

If you will be porting Linux to an embedded system, take a serious look at “Embedded Linux Primer, A Practical Real-World Approach” by Christopher Hallinan. It goes into much details of what is involved in embedding Linux.

Former Colleague Doug Gaff has a wrap-up of EclipseCon 2007. Why is this under embedded? Because Doug works for WindRiver and they are using eclipse all over the place; builds, debugging, hardware bring-up. Device Software Development Platform… Thinking eclipse = Java is soooo 20th century.

Comments Off

Long time readers (all 2 of you!) might bemoan the fact that there has not been a whole lot of technical content on this blog recently. Most entries seem to have been dominated by my ramblings on everything except embedded systems. This post will not unfortunately buck the trend. It seems that I spend all my technical capital at my day job, and there is no inspiration left to write about things embedded.

If you are interested in Agile methodologies, go see James Shore’s Agile Book draft. He is soliciting feedback from the community. The book promises to be very interesting. It’s an O’Reilly so it has to be good! I can’t wait too see the colophon design!
We all know that Unit Testing is a good thing. Do yourself a favor, and check out Roy Osherove’s The Art of Unit Testing blog site. It’s a subset of his main blog related to the book he is writing and unit testing in general. Roy and Eli Lopian have an ongoing discussion about the merit of Testable Object Oriented Designs or the lack thereof. All I can say is that Eli has definite opinions! Yet another blog to add to my growing collection…

Lastly, here is an interesting blog entry by John Bruggeman, the VP of marketing at WindRiver. It looks like a minor fumble by Apple in regards to it’s online music service.  In a nutshell:  You can only buy online iTunes gift certificates for the country you live in.  Not international gift giving allowed!  Not a situation that 99% of iTunes customers will encounter, but the remaining 1% could be vocal… Whoever said “There is no such thing as bad publicity” certainly wasn’t talking about a market leader.

No Comments »