Low Country Software Ramblings

Unlike Mike Gunderloy who “gets up early so you don’t have to”, I get up early so I can play chauffeur…
Community

Scott Hanselman has a cool little application interfacing to the Microsoft FingerPrint Reader…Not to be paranoid, but fingerprint readers as mass market items? Is big brother looming?

Cory Foy points out that Microsoft is looking for a .NET designer in Charlotte, NC. That’s in my backyard!

I admire Scott Bellware’s prose.  This gem came from his article on choosing the Entity Framework:

It’s an audience that has toiled under the idiocratic, dumbing-down forces of overly-declarative visual development styles for long enough to have been intellectually sterilized.  Until the move to a better balance between imperative and declarative styles has come to fruition in the Microsoft developer community, endless hoards of the programming undead will roam to corridors of corporate IT development shops searching for yet another hit on the old RAD crack pipe

Brian Livingston points out that the new Activation feature of Vista can be defeated indefinitely and was put in to help big customers manage their installations.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! (Via Edgar G Nilges who points out the point of activation is to hinder home users, not organized pirates)

Design & Development 

Scott Bellware reminds use that model-driven does not mean diagram-driven.

Michael has a very interesting article about “Hot Fix” and how they disrupt the normal flow of development.  As someone interested in improving the development process (and being involved in hot fixing), this has been one of the annoyances.  How to have a good process for hit fixes.

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Another week-end gone by much too fast…

Community

Ralph Depping has a blog with an embedded focus.  He is located in lovely Cork, Ireland. I wouldn’t mind spending more time on the Emerald Isle!

Larry O’Brien names names with this follow up to his machine being hacked…This points to the perils of poor customer service and remote management of servers.

Roy Osherove links to The 46 best-ever freeware Utilities at DonationCoder.com.  Not quite as comprehensive as Scott Hanselman’s list, but then again, Scott is the original “I’m a geek who loves to hoard and try every kind of software that ever existed, hopefully free”.
Design

Sam Gentile has a redesigned home site (thanks to Office Live Services).  Do check out his Software Engineering section.  It’s full of goodness.

Sam Gentile’s New and Notable 149 points out that Microsoft is working on better MVC support for ASP.NET
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror (a new favorite site!) turns his gaze to the 404 web page and how to design a more user friendly “page not found”.  Larry O’Brien thinks we should keep the 404 though.

Tim Ottinger points out that all software developement is Iterative; it’s simply a matter of granularity.

Scott Hanselman points to the uber-cool Optimus Mini Three Keyboard and it’s less than optimal programming model.  When a hardware shop does software…

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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)

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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)

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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.

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