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If there is one international conference you attend this year make sure this is the one (perhaps especially pertinent after the SaArchitect Software Factories presentation last night). From the Waterfall2006 site:

" After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You've always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design. "

Make sure you don't miss some of the most ground breaking tutorials of the year, like...

• Take Control of Your Team's Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• FIT Testing In When You Can; Otherwise Skip It by Ward Cunningham
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You'll Never Deliver by Jutta Eckstein
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us by Mike Cohn
• Testing: Saving the Best for Last by Lisa Crispin
• Document-Driven Development by Eric Evans

Workshops include...

• User Feedback: Eliminating the Main Cause of Project Overruns
• Is the SEI Letting Us Down?
• The Impact of Paper Bond Weight on Design Quality
• Creating a Culture of Conformance: Development, Deployment and Defense of Company-wide Procedures for Software Development
• Dinosaur Strategies: How Data Professionals Can Still Prosper in Modern IT Organizations by Scott Ambler
• Nailing Down Requirements: Techniques to Prevent Change
• CMM Level 6: It's Bigger Than Five So It Must Be Better
• Semantics: Teaching Your Users What They Really Need
• Upfront Design: If A Little Is Good, A Lot is Better

Get full details here.

(BTW, that SaArchitect comment was strictly tongue in cheek - it was an excellent and well prepared introduction to Software Factories and if you weren't there you missed out. Personally, I think DSLs are quite possibly the future but I also think taking an Agile approach to them is going to prove to be their path to success.)

Those of you who have seen the Channel9 vid of the Sparkle designer for WinFX will be excited to know that the first public release was made yesterday! You can get it here, and it is only 6.7Mb (although if you don't already have the January WinFX CTP and .NET Fx 2.0, you are looking at just over a gig of downloading).

[Via Sean Gerety]


ps, If you are in the Johannesburg area and don't have the bandwidth, feel free to contact me and have a chat...

A useful link to keep in your toolkit...

SOAPscope is Mindreef's easy-to-use, toolkit-independent Web services diagnostic system. Just enter the location of any WS's WSDL and you can then explore the web service dynamically, run diff tests and all sorts of other useful diagnostics.

[found via XMethods]

For those not in South Africa, the SA government is in advanced stages of planning for a bullet train that runs between Pretoria and Johannesburg, the two major cities in the Gauteng province. Although originally estimated at around R7bn the costs have now rocketed past R13bn.
 
Peter Bester, the author of this article, has done some calculations as to some of the alternative ways the same amount of money could have been spent. Options include adding 44 more lanes to the main arterial highway between the two cities (currently 3 or 4 in each direction) or sending every 19 year old in the province to university.