Misc
This post is going to be a bit all over the place, so bear with me.
Since starting my new contract almost a month ago, things have been
non-stop hectic and between that and the new activity in my personal
life, things have been busy.
The
JHB SaDev User Group meeting on Wednesday was a success, for the most part. Less that half of those that
RSVPed
actually turned up, which was disappointing and made the catering a bit
of a mix up. I suppose it might have been caused by the rain, which
caused quite a traffic snarl up, but the costs of catering come out of
our own pockets at this point, so it frustrates a little. Either way,
those that didn't or couldn't attend missed out on a great presentation
from
Armand and
Ernst on
LINQ, and the enhancements that are going to be made to the
C# 3.0 language.
Other things that we chatted about that I wanted to link to were
Omea Reader, an aggregator from
JetBrains that is the best free aggregator out there at the moment, IMHO. Oh yeah, that reminds me -
IMHO is also cool (it is a windows application that you can use to post to you blog with). Also, the
Microsoft TDD guidelines abortion,
the
code snippets feed. There was a whole bunch of other stuff we talked about and I wanted to
link to - I knew I should have come straight home and posted this...if
I have forgotten anything that you haven't managed to find on google
yet, then add a comment and I will update the post.
By the way - that TDD post from
Scott Bellware that I linked to above (
^)
has a really good break down of what TDD should be, and why it is such
a useful & effective design tool. Somewhere in the ensuing flamewar
(might even have been in the comments of that article), someone else
also pointed out a thing that people miss. When I first started with
TDD, I also didn't get this: You should only be writing one test at a
time, then implementing the code that makes the test pass. Then writing
your next test. The point being that in writing your first test and
implementing the code to make it pass, you will learn a lot about how
you should be architecting the solution and the design & structure,
which will influence how your next test is going to look - so no point
in writing a whole batch of tests and then implementing the code, since
this locks you down on a specific design and defeats the object of
using the tests as a design tool.
Other random things of interest; You can
add an Encarta AI engine to your MSN IM and ask it all sorts questions.
You can also shout at it and ask it how its mamma is doing, but that
would be childish. If you have the bandwidth, you have to download
this movie short. The best CGI I have seen. Ever. Plus, it is proudly South African. If you are into motorbikes,
this is a really cool feed to subscribe to - pity they only syndicate snippets, I hate that. Also check out
Uncyclopedia,
Wikipedia's evil cousin. Ruby lovers will enjoy
this site, full of rugby humour.
I also promised to post on some of the issues we are having with VS2005
RTM (quite a few - why should we be different to everyone else?), but
these bugs are one of the things that are eating into my time at the
moment and making my life difficult. I would like to spend some time on
the post so that I don't look like a
ranting ingrate, so expect that one soon.
I would also like to post on the successes and challenges we have been
having starting up a new XP team, since I think this will be
interesting to other developers, specifically those working in the
South African context. My schedule should ease up a little over
December, so watch this space.