November 2004 - Posts
Ted Neward's latest post on
his fight with Sun over his JavaGeeks.com website is classic! This guy is out in the community trying to promote their technology, he's writing books to help Java developers use Java effectively in the enterprise applications they develop, and Sun decides to pick a fight with him over his JavaGeeks.com website. The thing that I love is that Sun is actually paying a lawyer to go around to those in the community that are advocating their technology and basically picking a fight with them. Now that's something that makes a great company! I can't wait to read about this ingenious marketing strategy in
Jim Collins' next book.
If you are doing TDD go download this tool today. You can't beat having everyting you need for TDD within the friendly confines of VS.NET.
Micah Martin of
Object Mentor has an interesting article which
shows how the Command Pattern (& friends) can be used in place of delegates. I get a sense that Micah might be a little biased towards the Java world, but, none-the-less he offers a good example of how a .net specific implementation can be migrated to code that works on any platform with the help of patterns.
As I've outlined several times on this blog I've been trying to get my Mac setup with all the latest Mono frameworks and tools. This involves setting up the latest release, as well as trying to get a decent IDE to develop mono apps with. After lots of effort I've been defeated by the open source world. Getting a good IDE for mono development looks as if its not meant to be on the Mac. After spending hours trying to get everything installed for MonoDevelop (mostly Gtk# dependencies), debugging things with a couple peeps in the community I'm left with a install of MonoDevelop that loads when launched but completely bombs as soon as I try to open a project or a file. Why must the open source world be so difficult? Hopefully as time passes MonoDevelop will get more stable and better supported on the Mac. Until then I'm left with XCode or Eclipse. Anybody know how that port of Visual Studio for Mac is coming along? ;-)
Years ago many of us made the decision to go into "computers". Everyone has different reasons, and different motivators. As you look back on your decision would you do it all over again? With the "threat" of outsourcing, and all the other cicrumstances that are a part of our world would "computers" still be your choice?
Last night I was talking with my wife about one of her brothers that is looking to get into something which he can make into a career. He has interest in computers and mentioned it as one of the options he's considering. Since I'm "in the know" my wife asked me if I thought it was a good idea. After a long pause I answered with a revolutionary response....I don't know. My brother in law is thinking about going to CHUBB or some similar school.
The first question I asked was "What does he want to do?". I'm guessing he'd be more of a network admin type then a programmer type but I don't really have any basis for thinking that. Anyway it made me think about whether I would go into "computers" if I had to do it all over again...I would.
One of the more interesting projects I have on my plate at the moment involves writing a monitoring application for a client. One of the views that the client is requesting involves rendering a map with pinpoints showing the status of the "things we're monitoring". I've looked around at a couple different components but as with any component its hard to know if its good or bad without using it. Has anyone out in the blogosphere used a very slick mapping component. My requirements are as follows:
- Shows a plain jane map of a set of East coast states
- Allows me to provide a set of locations via a data feed (latitude, longitude)
- Allows me to choose the icon for the location so that I can swap out the icon to show the current status (red = problems, green = all good)
- Preferably has a real nice zoom, pan feature
- Allows near-real time update (Flash that pulls in a data feed every X minutes/seconds)
Can anyone offer any recommendations?
I'm sitting here on a Friday night trying to catch up on a side projects that I'm behind on. The project is really "friggin" boring. It allows employees to look up contacts on a corporate intranet. My client is an insurance company that has a bunch of agents that sell their insurance. Since the agents operate independently their isn't a central location for all the individuals at each of the agent locations.
WOOOOHOOOOOOO!
There is nothing like a super simple data entry app to get the juices flowing! Whidbey beta 2 can't come soon enough for me. At least then I'll be learning something new when I work on some of the more boring apps clients ask me to build 
A couple months ago I decided to purchase an Apple G4 Laptop. One of the main things I wanted to do in all my spare time was to get Mono installed. A couple weeks ago I got around to installing Mono. The process was very smooth thanks to the .dmg download available on the go-mono.com website.
As I began playing around with Mono I realized that I missed the nice friendly confines of VS.NET. Believe it or not vi just wasn't cutting it. I began to search for a IDE I could use on my Mac. I tried XCode with the C# templates by Druware, which seemed like a decent environment but not quite what I was looking for. Next up was Eclipse with Improve's C# Plugin which was pretty nice. Good syntax highlighting, compile time errors with source code references (click on the error and it takes you to the source file), however, the Improve plugin required setting references on individual files which was very awkward and unnatural. After a little more playing with different build targets within Eclipse I began to browse around for another alternative. About a week ago I decided to try and get MonoDevelop running despite the warnings on the mono-project.com website that the process was not for the feint of heart (which I read as not for those just messing around in spare time). A week later I'm still attempting to get all the dependencies installed that MonoDevelop requires. Unfortunetly I missed the step in the instructions on go-mono.com that said to set fink to unstable mode. This led to installing a bunch of older components that didn't satisfy the requirements for the MonoDoc and MonoDevelop applications. Last night after about a day and a half of updates via fink (don't worry they just run I wasn't sitting their watching it for the whole time) I think I'm a couple installs away from having MonoDevelop running.
All this has me thinking about who I need to track down at Apple to get future versions of OS X to include Mono, as well as a nice IDE with syntax highlighting, code completion, and an integrated debugger. If you happen to know who that is let me know :-)
I just started a project that I'm attempting to make agile. Those outside the development team (and perhaps project management) won't see it as being an agile, but I'm determined to make it as agile as possible. As part of this effort I'm planning on using TargetProcess to plan out the user stories to be completed for each iteration, and to help those working on the project keep track of what's on their plate for each iteration. As the iterations are completed additional user stories will be added to the project back log and based on priority they'll be assigned to future iterations. It's rather strange to estimate things in something other then hours but I'm looking forward to the experience of working through a project in an agile manner by tracking the velocity of the team, and using that to plan out what features we can fit into upcoming iterations.
What tools or utilities do others use to plan out agile projects? What has worked well? What hasn't?