Low Country Software Ramblings

Lane reversal arrives to small South Carolina town…
.NET

Brad Abrams has a bunch of links to streaming video presentations from Mix. Cool stuff by Andres Hejisberg on LINQ, John Lam and John Hugunin on Ruby and DLR.

Udi Dahan has posted a little class which makes using worker thread a bit easier.
Agile

Tim Ottinger writes about Coercive Immediacy. You can ignore a web site/application (a la VersionOne) but you can’t ignore a cork board setup in the common room…

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Who says a small town can’t have gridlock?

.NET

There is an IDE for PowerShell called PowerShell Analyzer. It looks quite yummy! I feel a download coming. (via The Daily Grind)

Scott Hanselman provides an interesting perspective on the significance of Silverlight for web application development.
Community

Somewhat off topic, but Tom Peter’s blog points to The Guardian’s list of greatest speeches of the 20th Century. Well worth a listen!

Testing

Jonathan Kohl has a great post on how to get started with Exploratory Testing. Worth a read.

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I have a tendency to fall in love with specific technologies. Past recipients of my affection included C, C++ and Python. Eiffel’s software by contract did catch my eye. I had to share a room with REXX, but that went nowhere. And Perl and Tcl, well…that was more of a one night stand. I never had the opportunity to know Java, but maybe we can meet for lunch someday?
My latest tryst is with .NET. I am just taken with the ease of development, the powerful tools and approach one can easily use: VS 2005, N/MbUnit, NPerf, NCover, FxCop, JetBrain’s Resharper. The list goes on and on. There is a freedom found in .NET that sadly, I am not experiencing at work. Sure, I write the occasional small program in C#, but most of the work is in C or C++. I have to deal with header files and function declarations, no built-in support for refactoring. Like a jilted lover, I’m starting to feel resentment towards my old flame.
I long to be free of the shackles of my past, and embrace a future with .NET.

Of course, one of the issues associated with my passion for new technologies is that a pernicious mindset can take hold: every problem can be solved with the judicious application of duct tape. Or as the old adage goes: when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Does the world really need a .NET ModBus Protocol library?

Maybe I should look into language counseling…

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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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Have you supported a good cause today?
.NET

Scott Guthrie talks about lambda expressions which make their debut in Orcas.  Functional programming, here we come!

Career

Adam Goucher describes 3 types of environment he’s experienced at different companies. The environment can definitely be a factor when looking at an employer.
Community

Larry O’Brien has high praise for Acronis TrueImage.  It just saved his bacon, or at least his computer. His diligence in doing daily backups also helped… I also like the way he partitions his drives: OS, bin (Program Files), data, media, and non-backup volatile. How does he get all his programs installed in their own partition?  Sometimes, they just want to be in C:\Program Files…
Brad Abrams has a fun little video of the Visual Studio “Defy all Challenges”.  You get to actually SEE what some of the big names look like.

Scott Hanselman has set a goal to raise $50,000 for Diabetes research.  This is a disease that affects a large segment of the population.  Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death in the US.  I made a contribution, as my way of giving back to Scott for the great content he has put out for the last 5 years.  Since I only have about 0.25% of his readership,  I would like to contribute that much to his cause.  That’s $125.  Can 5 generous readers contribute $25?

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