At Last!

I was all set today to (finally) send some e-mail to the OSCON (Open Source Convention) organizers, complaining about a lack of open source .NET coverage, and lo and behold, there’s a “Windows” track in this year’s conference. Not exactly what I wanted, and I don’t know how they can call it a “Windows” track when it includes two Mono sessions. Okay, yes, Mono does run on Windows, but come on; its a Linux technology. Microsoft does an adequate job of providing a .NET implementation for Windows; you might have heard of it.

Anyway, it looks like this year I’ll be attending OSCON, especially since it’s in Portland  …

4/26/2006 9:34:25 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

Unit Tests, Code Coverage, Cruise Control, etc.

I don’t think that its any surprise to the folks that know me that I advocate unit testing. Two of the big problems involved in unit testing are: making sure that your tests are up to date, and making sure that you have adequate code coverage.

For C# developers, NUnit is a great resource for unit testing. Based upon the original JUnit test framework, NUnit has surpassed its parent in a lot of ways. Anyone doing professional programming in C# (or VB for that matter) should be using it.

To handle coverage, there’s NCover; also a great tool. Unfortunately, NCover’s results appear textually.

Well, this has now changed.  There’s a new tool available called NCoverExplorer that provides a GUI front end to NCover. Version 1.3.3 even provides a way to add its coverage summary to Cruise Control’s web page.

As an aside, CruiseControl.NET is also a great tool. It provides continuous integration for .NET projects and works with both Subversion (for source control) and NAnt (for automated builds). It helps to solve the first problem mentioned above: making sure your tests are up to date. The way that CruiseControl.NET works, every time someone checks changes into Subversion, it gets those changes and automatically does a build. The build process can also include automatically running the suite of NUnit tests. Finally, it publishes the results to a web page. There’s also a monitor application that the developers can run locally so that they’re notified of the “health” of the build at all times. It’s amazing how much this helps to keep development on track.

To recap, here’s a list of tools that any professional C# developer should be using:

1. NUnit
2. NAnt
2. Subversion
3. CruiseControl.NET
4. NCover
5. NCoverExplorer

 

4/26/2006 9:11:40 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

Microsoft does it again

Well, the folks that gave us such brilliant product names as Microsoft.NET (search for THAT on the internet) and Windows DNA (what the heck does that mean???) have decided in their infinite wisdom  to rename the Monad shell to”Windows PowerShell”. What a stupid, stupid name. When will the powers that be at Microsoft wake up and realize that their marketing people are idiots?

4/25/2006 11:23:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

God

Lately, Scott Adams (of Dilbert) has been on a God/religion jag. His latest question/statement is (edited): do you believe in (1) Psychics? (2) God? (not a multiple choice, this is a two-parter.)

The Psychic thing I’ll leave alone.Scott seems to want to draw parallels between the two, and that just muddies the waters further.

As far as belief in God goes, this is an interesting conundrum. If someone believes in God, this is pretty straightforward. They say “yes, I believe in God, and here’s what I believe about God…”. Now, if someone says that they don’t believe in God, they then have to define what they don’t believe in. This generally goes something like “I don’t believe that God is an old, white man with a long flowing beard.” or “If a benevolent God exists, why is there so much strife in the world?”.

So, here’s the thing: what if we defined God to be “the force that causes the Earth to revolve around the Sun”. Now, who “believes” in God? Perhaps someone could argue that they don’t believe that this force is God, but then how is their opinion relevant when they’ve already said that they don’t believe in God?

So, the way I see it, people who believe in God have defined God in a believable (at least to themselves) way. People who don’t, have defined God as something not believable. So, its less about “belief” and more about definitions, and a “desire” to believe.

 

4/21/2006 9:52:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Looks like TiVo's not dead yet

As those of you who read this rag regularly should know, my original DVR maker, ReplayTV, is on the way out (they’ve announced that they won’t make hardware anymore but still are making software for Hauppage. sheesh).

TiVo just signed a 3 year extension to their deal with DirectTV. I suspect that DirectTV will end up owning the company, and folding their technology into the main company. That seems to be the trend in DVR’s now, providing them as part of service rather than as a 3rd party product. I’m now renting a Comcast DVR, and am fairly happy with it. Lots of nice features that ReplayTV didn’t have, though some are missing (no skip ahead, no way to say “just record this program  on certain nights”, etc). But, by and large, I’m okay with it. And I know the non-technical people who have one, like my sister (except hers is from Time Warner), love them.

Wave of the future, baby.

Too bad ReplayTV pissed off the rest of the industry (with commercial skip) and so couldn’t forge the kind of deal that TiVo did with DirectTV.

4/12/2006 8:45:19 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Free Will? Free Willy? Free Beer?

Scott Adams, in his Dilbert Blog, has been talking about Free Will lately. He chalks up people’s belief in it to “superstition”, but I suspect that his reliance on science to define his reality is also “superstitious”. Nevertheless, I recommend reading this, it’s very thought provoking.

By the way, if you do read his posts, I (personally) don’t believe that random numbers really exist: They’re a useful fabrication / model that simplifies the work of mathematicians and scientists.

Frankly, I think that anyone who discusses “reality” in any meaningful way is just fooling themselves.

4/11/2006 8:58:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

72 inches...

LG is bringing their 72 inch plasma display to the US (it’s been out in Korea for a year and a half)…

 

 

And it’s only $28,000.00

 

(info thanks to Engadget)

4/6/2006 3:48:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

Boy, that was fast

Yesterday, Apple announced Boot Camp, their soon to be released system to allow dual booting of Intel-Macs between Windows XP and OS X. I commented to someone that while this was good news for Mac users who want/need to run Windows applications, a virtual machine solution would be better, so they could run both OS’s at the same time (We’re using VMware now to do this, and it’s great).

Today Parallels, a VM producer, announced Parallels Workstation 2.1, that supports Intel-based OS X as the host OS and allows other Intel based OS’s as guest OS’s. So, there you go: Windows XP running as a guest OS on top of Mac OS X. Just what the doctor ordered. And it only took a day … 

4/6/2006 9:48:43 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

A new category

It seems that I need a new category: technology. Now I can tag entries that deal with tech that might not deal with development. One less thing to throw into "general" :)

 

4/6/2006 9:33:13 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

Now, here's a switch

I spent the weekend hearing various folks talk about the latest (illegal) immigration flap. It was a little disconcerting to hear the left against helping poor people (e.g. “these people are stealing jobs from honest americans”) and the right for helping poor people (e.g. temporary work visas and some program to “legalize” those already here).

Frankly, I think there’s an ugly racist subtext to the whole debate. Almost everyone is talking about aliens crossing the Mexican border and almost no one is talking about: 1. The fact that potential terrorists have crossed the Canadian border and 2. The fact that a significant chunk of illegal immigrants (that is, aliens without a valid visa or work permit) come from Europe. So far, the only person I’ve heard talk about that is John McCain.

So here’s an intellectual puzzle for you: Why is it okay for trade to cross the borders without restriction (i.e. NAFTA), but not workers? Discuss amongst yourselves

 

4/3/2006 9:44:30 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  politics

Alistair Cockburn has an interesting article at his site...

Alistair Cockburn has an interesting article at his site: Are Iterations Hazardous to Your Project?

Hmm. It turns out that this article isn’t particularly new (from 9/9/2005), but still, very interesting (I found out about this from Sam Gentle’s site).

I took away, two bits of information from this article:

First, it shows how people can go wrong when trying to implement an agile development strategy, and (in fact) how they could succeed without doing agile development per se. It helps to underscore the important distinctions between “how to success” and “how to fail” beyond just “do agile” (what bad grammar!).

The second bit of information was more intriguing: The article is essentially a “fine tuning” of agile development. Instead of talking about “why agile development is good / better than waterfalling”, it talks specifically about how to be successful within agile development. This shows just how much agile development is moving to be mainstream.

A recent SDTimes article said that of surveyed companies, 19% were doing agile development. It sounds pretty low, but I wonder what other categories people answered with. How many were doing RUP-style I/I development, how many were doing Waterfall-style development, and how many were not really following any formal development strategy (I suspect the last category was the largest)? I think that the next 5 years are going to see a dramatic change in how mainstream software is developed.

3/27/2006 4:25:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development