Haven't posted in a while now but MSDN Magazine (September 2005) has an article on Dependency Injection (aka IOC). More interestingly, Spring Framework .NET 1.0 rc has been released. It's one of a number IOC/AOP frameworks out there like the Castle Project, Pico etc.. but I find the documentation quite polished compared to the others.

There's still a bit of debate on the terms IOC (inversion of control) or DI, Fowler coined DI but others prefer IOC. Some historical background on IOC can be found in the Avalon project's documentation and here

ThoughtWorks have put together another tool, Tree Surgeon
Has anyone tried this out yet? I've just browsed the homepage for this project and it sounds similar to tools I've used for Java where a skeleton project with unit tests, nant build scripts and other goodies are created for you . If it turns out to be in the same vein, I know I'll be hooked :-)

A bit of news recycling but it's interesting to look at the list of winning products. http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/3483116 .Net didn't fare too well, I wonder what 2005 has in store. I can't agree with all the winners but Eclipse certainly deserves the recognition. The irony is that Mono won an award :-).

Just noticed this article up by Grady Booch (one of the amigos). It's his take on the MS software factory ideas. I don't really have an opinion on this yet but think its worthy of a mention.

Bug tracking or, as most would like to euphemistically put it, issue tracking is an often overlooked element of most projects. To be fair, issue tracking is really a superset of bug tracking but for my purposes they are synonymous. I've been searching for a semi-decent and affordable personal issue tracker and my journey hasn't turned up many. I've found three so far from Open source to commercial.

• FogBugz. Commercial, quite easy to use but not very configurable without heading to the sql backend.
• Gemini. Commercial but with a free 10 user license. So far I find this a better tool than FogBugz but haven't seen it used in a team environment, unless I is a team :-). Also lacking a few configuration options but visiting the sql backen is possible.
• BugZilla. Open source bug tracking system used and created, imaginatively, by the Mozilla Organization. It's still in the process of making the transition to being a friendly Windows resident but even so appears to be a bit of overkill for tiny projects given its room for scalability.

Issue tracking will always be, well, an issue, so its safe to say this issue isn't resolved, the search goes on...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...it was my first blog entry :-).

<apologies>Mr Dickens</apologies>