As I was driving home today, I couldn't help notice something. Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC framework is still in beta, and was only announced last October. To my knowledge, there are currently three projects in the Edmonton area based off this framework.
Castle Monorail has been around for much longer, three years or so? It's still listed as a release candidate on it's website, but I'd say Monorail is suitable for production.
Note: I originally wrote this post on August 23, 2008. As things change with the book NHibernate in Action, I will be updating this post and resetting the date.
I'd like to take a break from boring you two readers of my blog about my experience with Linux and VMware, and take a moment to annoy you with a rant. Diversity is the spice of life after all.
This little remonstration of mine is about the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP).
Well, I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to get around to this: but I must say that there are now a couple of "must haves" in my web developer's tool box. One of them is jQuery, and now the other is QUnit.
Chad Myers has a good, quick, post introducing QUnit, I'd strongly suggest checking it out if you do web development (which, IMHO, implies some use of JavaScript, right?
At the last Edmonton Agile Methods User Group meeting, we had a brief discussion around code coverage, and what should be an acceptable number to shoot for. Is it okay when the unit tests cover 80% of the code? Or should 100% be the only acceptable value? After all, how can you be confident in your code knowing that 20% of it isn't tested.
Allow me to go out on a limb here, and state with absolute certainty that the correct answer is "It depends on your situation".
Last night (Thursday, June 26th) Rod Paddock gave a talk on using Silverlight 2.0 to the Edmonton .NET User Group. I'd say that Rod did a pretty good job, despite the fact that the beta of both Silverlight and Expression Blend didn't exactly want to play nice all the time. It's definitely perked my interest in the technology, and I can see a lot of business potential for it. The rich user experience that Silverlight brings to the web-browser, will, I think raise the bar for what web applications will do for businesses.
As far as web developer's go, I'll freely admit that my Javascript is not one of my strong points. I don't have a real good reason for this, it's just that over the past few years I haven't had much call/need to polish and hone my Javascript skills. Recently I discovered jQuery, and I must say that I wish I had know about this library earlier. The more I use jQuery, the more I like it.
Wordy title. To wordy. Kind of like build files these days. I remember when I first discovered Ant, and then Nant* . I was pretty happy, as it allow a decent way to compile my Java (and C#) without using make files. Life was good as I could finally introduce some structure into HOW code was compiled. The build process was no longer using whatever "build" command the IDE exposed, hoping that I didn't forget a compiler directive or a file or a reference to some other library along the way.
On Thursday, April 24, at the Edmonton .NET User's Group, I did a presentation on MonoRail (and a bit on Windsor and ActiveRecord). Thanks to all for coming out hear me talk.
I found it to be a pretty hard topic to cover in not quite 120 minutes. There is just so much to cover and explain. As well, it seemed that there were a couple in the crowd that felt a bit overloaded.
Jeremy Miller talking about the trials and tribulations of keeping a codebase viable and useful over the past four years. A lot of tips and explanations were backed with diagrams on the whiteboard. Kind of hard to blog that stuff, so this will probably be just a collection of bullets.
Lessons learned - a lot of them relate back to what are considered good, OO practices:
DRY, especially with the very small things.
Two topics merged into one. Rod Paddock wants to talk about stored procs, and others want to learn how to explain NHibernate to other people who aren't familiar with it (and minimize the jargon).
Rod uses a custom code-gen solution based heavily on sprocs - a data driven approach. Sounds like it works well for him. Oren concurs that this technique could be very effective in certain circumstances. It will have problems with complex situations that deal with convoluted/difficult data scenarios.
