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SDLC Progress
01 September 08 08:07 PM | cjlotz | 2 comment(s)

I've been spending the last month or two getting the SDLC procedures and infrastructure in place for the Silverlight release of our company's Enterprise Physical Asset Management system.  We were already using Team Foundation Source Control but wanted to adopt SCRUM as our development methodology and improve on some of our development practices such as using Continuous Integration , Test Driven Development, better Work Item Management and enhanced quality through Code Reviews, Check...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Agile, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis, TeamSystem

Code Reviews using TFS Tools
25 August 08 07:47 PM | cjlotz | 2 comment(s)

I've previously blogged about using code reviews as an effective way to minimize defects, improve code quality and keep code more maintainable.  In my new job I had to define a code review process that suited our development team as well as the Team Foundation Server toolset and the Conchango SCRUM for Team System process template we are using.  This post details what process and tooling we came up with. Review Style To improve on the cost-benefit factor of the reviews we opted for...

Filed under: Agile, Teamwork, Coding, TeamSystem

In Search of Content Collaboration Tools
29 April 08 02:14 PM | cjlotz | 2 comment(s)

We went through an exercise in the past month or so of trying to select the best platform to use in our company to engage the development communities using mediums like forums/blogs and for managing the content surrounding our development methodology, coding standards and processes through using a wiki. We are currently using two different open source products - MoinMoin as a wiki and phpBB for developer related forums. These products work fine, but the idea was to see whether there are better alternatives...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Teamwork

Izindaba #21
07 December 07 05:35 AM | cjlotz | with no comments

Time for another weekly round-up of developer news that focuses on .NET, agile and general development content. (Izindaba = Zulu for News). .NET Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework CTP - News from the BCL Team on the CTP and newly created Parallel Computing Developer Center . ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing and ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views - Scott Guthrie continues with his series on the new ASP.NET MVC Framework. CTP coming soon! ASP...

Filed under: SDLC, DeveloperTools, Learning, C#, Silverlight, Orm, VisualStudio, ASPNet, CLR, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis, Javascript, ADONet, Misc, Mono, Design, TeamSystem, F#

Izindaba #19
23 November 07 05:06 AM | cjlotz | with no comments

Time for another weekly round-up of developer news that focuses on .NET, agile and general development content. (Izindaba = Zulu for News). .NET Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 shipped! - Just in case you missed the announcement Any idea on how long we will have to wait for our MSDN Subscriber DVD's? Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008 - The top 10 new features according to the Visual Basic Team. Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, Silverlight - Scott Guthrie...

Filed under: TDD, DeveloperTools, Learning, Ajax, Silverlight, Dsl, VisualStudio, ASPNet, CLR, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis, VB.NET, SQL

Izindaba #10
20 September 07 03:28 PM | cjlotz | with no comments

A bit earlier than normal, but it is time for another weekly roundup of news that focuses on .NET, agile and general development related content: NCover 2.0.1 released - NCover follows the route of other tools before it like TestDriven.NET , NDepend and CodeSmith and becomes a commercial product. Here's the what's new for the latest release. NCoverExplorer 1.4.0 - Grant Drake has released an update to his excellent NCoverExplorer tool containing some fixes and new features . This will be...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Agile, Linq, Ajax, Ruby, CLR, Teamwork, DynamicCodeAnalysis

Izindaba #8
07 September 07 07:47 AM | cjlotz | with no comments

Time for another weekly roundup of news that focuses on .NET and general development related content: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta White Paper Counting Wastes Time and How Are You Going To USE That Information - Some thoughts from Fred George on collecting metrics and using metrics in an Agile development environment. Scott Bellware expands on his thoughts with reference to BDD. 20 Tips to Improve ASP.NET Application Performance - Nice list of ASP.NET performance enhancement tips. MbUnit 2.4...

Filed under: TDD, Agile, C#, Silverlight, Orm, ASPNet, BDD, DDD, Frameworks, Teamwork, OS, Misc, Mono

Izindaba #7
31 August 07 07:32 AM | cjlotz | 1 comment(s)

Time for another weekly roundup of news that focuses on .NET and general development related content: Lamda Expressions - The Basic Instincts column of the September 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine has a great article on lamda expressions that shows how the compiler uses a process called variable lifting to create a closure class to contain the free variables used in the lamda expression. Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows - Be aware, this may turn out...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Agile, Languages, Linq, Ajax, Silverlight, Orm, VisualStudio, ASPNet, Teamwork, XML, Compilers, VB.NET, ADONet, SQL

Code Reviews
28 August 07 11:41 PM | cjlotz | 11 comment(s)

Code reviews are a proven, effective way to minimize defects, improve code quality and keep code more maintainable. It encourages team collaboration and assists with mentoring developers. Yet, not many projects employ code reviews as a regular part of their development process. Why is this? Programmer egos and the hassles of packaging source code for review are often sited as some reasons for not doing code reviews. In a previous post on Code Metrics, I mentioned that I felt code reviews should form...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis

Izindaba #6
24 August 07 07:43 AM | cjlotz | 1 comment(s)

Time for another weekly roundup of news that focuses on .NET and general development related content: NUnit 2.4.3 Released - Another update that includes mostly bug fixes. SketchPath - A XPath development and XML analysis tool. PowerShell Toolbox - Collection of PowerShell links. LLBLGen Pro v2.5 Released - Frans Bouma reports on the new features in the latest release of this .NET ORM. Mocking Linq: Preview - News from Eli Lopian on the forthcoming support for mocking LINQ queries from the TypeMock...

Filed under: TDD, DeveloperTools, Agile, Object-Orientation, Learning, Linq, Ajax, Orm, VisualStudio, IoC, ASPNet, Ruby, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis, Javascript, Powershell, XML

Izindaba #4
10 August 07 08:01 AM | cjlotz | 1 comment(s)

Time for another weekly roundup of news that focuses on .NET and general development related content: VS 2008 Beta2 Fixes - Scott Guthrie on issues discovered with Beta 2 and workarounds for the issues. One Mock per Test - Some TDD advice from David Laribee Applying Agile to Ruby - Steve Eichert links to a talk by Fred George from ThoughtWorks on how important many of the core agile practices are when working with a dynamic language like Ruby. Domain Model Test Helper - Test helper that provides...

Filed under: TDD, Agile, Linq, Orm, VisualStudio, Ruby, BDD, DDD, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis, SOA

Code Metrics
02 January 07 11:10 PM | cjlotz | 10 comment(s)

I've been wanting to do a post about code metrics for quite a while now - mostly to organize my thoughts on the topic as it is something that I want to introduce at work, but also to get some feedback from other people as to if and how they are using metrics to assist them in crafting quality code.  After reading Jeremy Miller's post on the topic, I thought I might as well take the plunge.   I'll start by musing over what metrics I found to be useful, then continue with...

Filed under: DeveloperTools, Teamwork, StaticCodeAnalysis