Nothin but .Net (Day 1)

Nothin But .NET

May be you have read already: Jean-Paul Boodhoo is currently here in Germany giving his great Nothin but .NET training.
I am happy to join and to learn a lot of .Net stuff, come into discussion with JP and the other attendees.
The course is very intense, that means: Starting the day at 8.30 after breakfast, training and coding sessions the whole day until 10.00pm (or later)!
JP sent a lot of stuff for course preparation: A list of prerequisites (VS2008, Resharper, ...), a screencast explaining how to prepare and configure the machine and - and that's what I have never seen before with a training - some homework exercise to get into TDD. The exercise consists of a prepared unit test (of course, written in JP's BDD style) together with skeleton of a class to test. I was our job to complete the class to all the unit test running. This was really a cool preparation and i got appetite for more!

Day 1:
After a small introduction JP started with having a look at our exercise results and picks up one to refactor it more and more. The intense use of lambda expressions to build a fluent interface for searching and sorting signals: that will be a tough week! And, a lot of bloggers mentioned already, JP is fast, really fast in coding. I can't imagine where he stores all the keyboard shortcuts for VS, R#, GVIM, Vimperator, ...
We covered a lot of topics and can' summarize all, but there some of them I definately want to dig in more.
Here a small list of my coding highlights from day 1:
- Specification pattern
- Interface based programming
- Coding by intention
- Don't start with inheritance, refactor to inheritance
- Extension methods are also available for .Net 2.0

I will do my very best to continue blogging during this week! But forgive me if I fall asleep at the keyboard ;-)

Do you know "Bear Programming"

If you are a software developer you are probably familiar with a situation like this:
You are working on some code, but it refuses to do what you want and you are going to become crazy! This is a point where you ask a colleague for help. Now, what often happens, during the explanation of your problem to your colleague: you see the solution by yourself!
Do you know this? (I'm sure you do!)

Then have a look at this post of Gojko Adzic and his thoughts about Kuniaki Igarashi's presentation on Omoiyari-Driven Development (ODD)!

I totally agree with him!

So let us convince our managers that one peace of our equipment has to be a

Unit Testing: What should I test?

I had some discussions with my colleagues about what to test in unit tests.

I have to admit that it was always theoretical, because we didn't have any real project experience with it. But we are migrating some VB6 stuff to .NET and therefore it is an important topic for us.
But the most emotional discussion was about: Should i test internals or only the public interface?

I would like to cite Derik Whittaker final statement in his comparison, because that's exactly my point of view: "At the end of the day this comes down to a personal/philosophical decision and both are better then the alternative....NO TESTS."

Xmas is coming...

.. when you walk arround, you can see more and more that xmas is coming.
There are flashing lights in the windows and a lot of trees are decorated so wonderful.
But what about all the applications and their windows we use?
Boring! Isn't it?

Now DevExpress has some funny stuff for this season:


Shouldn't every application have skins like that?
Imagine what is possible! Don't think only on xmas. What's about easter, summer, helloween, carnival, ...
... or even local events like the bavarian "Oktoberfest".

Isn't it wonderful?

The force will be with you...

Do you know ReSharper?


Itself says it is "The Most Intelligent Add-In To Visual Studio".
I have had a try and I'm really impressed!
May be the most of you have heared and/or had a chance to run a trial.
Have a look at the new demo (Jedi Coding) Ilya Ryzhenkov has published!

If you dare to have a look, keep in mind: Nothing is sharper than a lightsaber!

Aller Anfang ist...

...schwer?
Nein, mit Google, so würde ich sagen, ist aller Anfang eher leicht.
Mit meinem Google Mail Account war gleich Tür und Tor geöffnet für viele nützliche und hilfreiche Tools aus der Google Welt. Ich nutze neben Mail nun regelmäßig den Reader(RSS), den Kalender über mein persönliches iGoogle Portal.

Mit dem heutigen Tag werde ich mich nun auch noch diesen Blog pflegen.
(Mal sehen wie lange ich das am Leben erhalten werden?)

Worum wird es hier gehen?

Hier werde ich in Zukunft meine persönlichen Erfahrung im Bereich Softwareentwicklung zum Besten geben.

Der Schwerpunkt wird wohl auf .NET liegen und sich thematisch auf NHibernate und das Castle Framework konzentrieren.

Aber wer weis, wohin es mich noch treiben wird...