When I first came on board my current employer, apart from the great teams, great benefits, and all the other goody-goody stuff, there were a couple of things that bothered me slightly. One of those was the belief that all of the developer machines should have identical software setups, and that exploring with other software…
Being Agile is /not/ easy!
James Shore had a great blog entry about inflated claims, specifically now that agile is starting to cross the chasm into the mainstream. What I find so interesting about Agile is that in order to be good at it, you have to do a lot of work both to stay disciplined and to become a…
The Power of the Internet
Today I got an email regarding a tutorial on setting up PPTP with Monowall from a gentleman in Brazil. The email he sent was in Portuguese, but I was able to pick out “Monowall”, “porta 5900”, “acesso remoto” and some other keywords which led me to believe he was trying to open a hole in…
A different way of grouping tests?
Recently on the TDD list , we were discussing the benefits/drawbacks of long test names. I had posted an example to one I use in my Fitnesse talks that looks like public void RemovingLastUserFromRoomRemovesRoomFromAvailableRoomList() {}. Jeff Langr initially suggested something more along the lines of EmptiedRoomIsUnavailable, which I thought was a little too concise to…
Hiding variable declarations in Fitnesse
Handy little tip – if your page has a lot of variable declarations like: !define myVar {1}!define myOtherVar {2}!define someOtherVar (blahblah) You can hide it from view by wrapping it with a collapsable section. So the above would look like: !*****> Variable Declarations!define myVar {1}!define myOtherVar {2}!define someOtherVar (blahblah)**********! and would show up automatically collapsed…
NUnit, CodePlex, and other news
This weekend was quite busy. First, I’m excited to announce that I’ve been added as an official NUnit developer. I’ll continue working on making sure NUnit builds and tests cleanly in Mono, especially on Linux. In addition, the NUnit team has announced two new-ish projects. The first is a VSUnit Visual Studio plugin that Charlie…
Pictures from St. Louis Code Camp
While I wasn’t able to get pictures of the sessions, mostly because I was speaking in some of them, I did get some shots around the Code Camp: Registration Desk MPR1 / Conference Room Breakfast is served! MPR2 / Main Room Rams / Conference Room Microsoft showing off technologies (note the screen on the XBox…
St. Louis Code Camp Follow up and Slides
Yesterday was the St. Louis Code Camp, and what a great time! I believe around 70-80 people showed up, and we had some really great presentations. On top of the books Apress donated, Microsoft donated some books, goodies, and an XBox 360! The day consisted of four sessions across four different rooms. The first session…
Ruby ActiveRecord and Windows Forms
In getting ready for my talk this weekend on Ruby, I scanned the RubyCLR project founder’s web site, and came across this post: This is a really exciting development in RubyCLR. I’ve taken the first steps in integrating Rails’ most excellent ActiveRecord object-relational mapping layer with Windows Forms data binding. He then goes on to…
Pair-Programming in the Wall Street Journal
In the article Tech Companies Check Earlier for Flaws, the WSJ almost does a good job bringing the need to slow down an inject slack into an organization in order to produce higher quality code. I say almost because while it hits some good points, like: While the BlackBerry had escaped serious scrutiny for security…