Dennis van der Stelt

Newsflash

Sometimes I'm reading up on my subscribed weblogs and just see so much that I want to share. Inspired by Peter Provost his Geek Notes, this might be a repeatable feature.

• Waterfall 2006
  This is the place to be. Forget about Agile 2006, let's all meet at Waterfall 2006. At the website, don't forget to read the session names and the first paragraph after the sessions.  [...]
• Code Coverage in TestDriven.NET
  The tool once called NUnitAddin, now supports code coverage. Unfortunatly only in the Team Editions of VS2005, probably because it's already there in some form. Let's hope it's maker, Jamie Cansdale, can also support it in other versions of VS2005. Perhaps those nice little green and red icons that VS2005 has in its VSTT can also be added in VS2005 through TestDriven.NET :-) [...]
• Since a while I'm digging myself into both MSF 3 and MSF Agile. Via David Anderson I'm reading that MSF practitioners/trainers Andy Delin and Clementino Mendonca are also blogging. Let's see what they have to say, subscribed.
• And after reading Clementino his weblog, what do I see? Turbo Pascal 5.5 as a free 'antique software' download at the Borland website! Is that cool or what?! :-)
• In one of my latest posts about WIndows Workflow, I replied to a comment poster that the WF and WCF Go Live licenses are out. Now you've read it here also.
• Service Orientation, what it is not.
  First, Steve Swartz kicked in some doors with his Channel 9 video. Richard Turner agrees with him and adds some more comments. Especially the Service Orientation != Service Oriented Architecture statement can be confusing. Remember who said we should say SO/A? While everyone is trying to solve problems with all these technologies, methodologies, patterns and much much more, It's getting more and more confusing. ;-)

References are added as [...] links.

How a company can make life beautiful

It's surprising how beautiful life can be. Some company (or someone) can just create something that will make your day, makes you smile, feel better and creates the urge to give something back. Giving back I do by blogging about it. :-)

This time it's Google with their GMail app/website. I already liked it really, really much. Until this morning, when I received a mail from my friend Ramon. When you receive pictures as attachements, GMail already shows you a small preview at the bottom of the mail, along with the links to download them. This time, Ramon sent my four funny movies, and GMail offered a link for every movie. But it also offered a link to download all attachments at once! I clicked it, and immediatly was offered a download dialog window with a zip file to download all files at once. Once downloaded, I unzipped the archive and watched the movies. No need for four download dialogs, just one to download them all. No waiting for the attachements to be zipped, instant download.

Life can be so beautifull. If you want this too, email me for either a GMail invitation or the four movies. :-)

TechEd Europe cancelled?

For some reason, the news was spread around that TechEd Europe was cancelled. Even officially, although the article (in Dutch) is very vague, talking about TechEd being cancelled, to continue that it'll be held in november. When I spoke about the cancellation with my friend Miguel Jiménez he told me he just got requests for topics for TechEd 2006 from Microsoft. So I got curious. Later I got hold of a Microsoft mail that informed the reader that TechEd Europe and IT Forum were being combined into a two week event, one week for both. It'll be held in Barcelona in november, because of various reasons. More details can now be found here.

So it seems Spain is the place to be this year. Not sure what the opportunities are, but I'd sure like to meet Miguel there. I've heard he knows his way around Barcelona, so that should be some fun! ;-)

Windows Communication Foundation website

Switch statement humor

Today during a code review session at a client, we spoke about using the switch statement in C#, instead of the if statement. A few hours later I got the reply that they were now using the switch statement.

if (Switch == 1)

{

        // do something here

}

else if (Switch == 2)

{

        // do something else

}

Funny :-)

Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2

This could not have arrived at a better time! I just heard from Marc van de Wert that Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2 was just released. The good news is, that it can run on the RTM version of Visual Studio 2005, where the previous version ran (or actually still runs) only on VS2005 Beta 2.

At my current project, where Marc is also on my team, we just decided to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Anko, who dove deep into WF since it went public on the PDC, convinced me to use it, after a short introduction at the office. But because of the VS2005 Beta 2 restriction, we couldn't actually connect to WF yet. Now we can! While a lot of people are talking about it, we're probably one of the first to actually implement it in a real life project! From the technology part, this is going to be one of my most exciting projects ever, because we're using a lot of other great (new) technologies.

Oh, be sure to install the december Pre-release WinFX runtime components first.

update : Go figure, I just wanted to download this version, it was already on my laptop. While downloading it a few days ago, I had no idea this version was the latest and compatible with my VS2005 RTM release... :-)
Typical by the way, that I cannot find info on this release on any weblog. Aren't people excited about WF?

Pragmatic Manager

I'm currently reading Behind Closes Doors, written by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby. It's released under the Pragmatic Bookshelf label, and they're a great read. I've just finished Pragmatic Unit Testing and they had some good info that will come in handy. Recently I downloaded a video of a Johanna Rothman presentation on my laptop that I still need to see some day. I decided to search a bit more info she wrote or presented. And have I found some.

• If you like podcasts, check out the TeamAgile interviews page. She talks in part 1 and part 2 about 9 steps each organization might want to consider as they start to move toward the more Agile development process. She discusses daily builds, defining milestones, ranking requirements, etc.
• On the same page, there's another talk with Johanna called hiring techies and nerds (a reference to her book). It links to another page where you can also download the mp3.
• Johanna of course has her own website, including a weblog, the pragmatic manager newsletter and much more!

Now if you're not interested, at least I have the links here for my own reference.