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Posted on December 31st, 2009
Just a quick note – for those of you who were familiar with my role as the Community Liaison with the Scrum Alliance. Effective today, my role has been transition out due to some reorganization happening. There will be announcements in the near future, but for now if you need something related to the Scrum Alliance, please contact Howard Sublett or Lowell Lindstrom.
It was a pleasure serving the community that I got to work with, and hope you all have a Happy New Year!
Posted on December 20th, 2009
For quite a while now, if you want to learn Ruby, you have the Pickaxe book, Why’s guide, and the fabulous Edgecase Ruby Koans on GitHub.
The Koans are especially interesting because all you really need to do is setup a working environment and go. It tells you what you need to do next, by way of running the tests and seeing what passes.
I thought to myself, why the heck don’t we have something like that for other languages? There are some obvious challenges – for example, doing it in .NET it has to be compiled, and some of the things don’t map well. But in the spirit of, “If you’re going to fail, fail as publicly as possible” I’m announcing the launch of the DotNet Koans.
The goal of the project is to eventually have a guide for C#, F#, and VB.NET – likely in that order. Ok, likely the first two, and hopefully some VB’r will jump on the third. Right now I have three of the twenty-five koans ported over – AboutAsserts, AboutNil and AboutArrays. I’ve hacked together a custom runner for xUnit.NET which tells you where you are every time you build.
My goal right now is to get everything ported over pretty much as-is, and then look at making sure this fits a good progression. For example, I don’t know if the Koans will lend themselves to LINQ, but that’s something that should be covered.
The project is now public up on GitHub at http://github.com/CoryFoy/DotNetKoans – feel free to download it, play with it, and contribute (or critique) if you’d like.
Posted on December 10th, 2009
Agile. Scrum. XP. Lean. It’s hard to turn anywhere without running into the signs that something is afoot in the development community. Next thing you know, your manager is asking you to deliver working software in a week – with code coverage metrics to boot!
In this intensive, hands-on, 3-day session we cover the basics you need to know to get a better understanding of working in an agile environment. We include topics such as Planning and Estimating, Test-Driven Development, Refactoring, and working with tools such as Visual Studio Team Edition, NUnit and Resharper. This ensures that by the end of the third day you’ll have a solid footing for working in an agile environment.
The course is taught by Cory Foy, a former Microsoft Field Engineer who is active in both the Agile and .NET Communities. Cory has helped organizations of all sizes adopt agile practices, and has been an invited speaker to events such as TechReady and the North America Software Craftsmanship conference. In addition, he’s contributed to projects such as NUnit and FitNesse, and helps run the Agile Tampa user’s group when he isn’t speaking at other user groups.
Course dates are February 15th-17th in sunny Tampa, FL. Registration is $1295 and limited to 15 people. Breakfast and lunch will be provided all three days, and group and company discounts are available. To get more information, or to register, please contact info@coryfoy.com or call (813) 352-0233, or see the registration site.
We look forward to seeing you there!