DDD Ireland Agenda published

The agenda has been published for **DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day - Ireland ** which is being held on the Saturday May 3rd 2008 in Galway. I can’t make it to the event, but it does look well worth the trip. Keep an on on the conference web site RSS feed to see when registration opens.

February 18, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Sharepoint is like a shelf that is too short.....

You have all these books to put on a shelf and as you put one on at one end another one falls off at the other. You just can’t get them all on at the same time. What do I mean by this? Sharepoint has many features and with these come limitations due to the way features have been implemented. I am repeatedly finding that to use feature A means that you cannot use all of feature B. Historic choices can have a huge impact on what can be done in the future. ...

February 15, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Scottish Developers

Thanks to Colin Mackay for organising the Scottish Developers event in Glasgow last night; as promised I have uploaded the slide on TFS that I presented. I am already looking forward to seeing everyone again at Developer Day Scotland which is also being held in Glasgow at the Caledonian University.

February 13, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Voting opens Developer Day Scotland

Vote early vote often……

February 11, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Next meeting of the Extreme Programming Club

The next meeting of the extreme programming club is going to be held on the Thursday the 14th of February 2008 at the Victoria Hotel, at 7.00pm, Leeds. Get Directions » Next meeting is happening on Thursday 14th of February There are going to have two shorter, or rather more agile talks: “CRAP hits the fan - Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor” - new kid on the block of software metrics and static code analyzers presented by Daniel Drozdzewski - Java developer at Erudine. This presentation focuses on software metrics in general or rather their failure and proposes gentle solution supported by examples in Java. ...

February 11, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

New Banner Image

I felt it was time for a new banner image, my triathlon photo had been up a while. So I have used one of the new cartoons our designer Lauren has done for all the staff at Black Marble. Commemorative limited edition collectors plate will soon be available.

February 8, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Another declarative programming language to try to test

At the Alt.NET UK conference there was a good deal of discussion about tactics to test declarative languages such as XAML in WPF applications. Well it seems we have another one coming out of the Oslo project - ‘D’. Looks like there is no escape, testing of declarative languages is going to be a ripe area to develop tools and techniques.

February 7, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Oh to be a tester....

Whilst at the Alt.net conference it was pointed out that I have a different view of the role of a tester in a software development team to many other people. It seems a tester, to many people, is viewed as a person who follows manual test scripts and/or monitors automated systems, they are really part of the QA process not part of development. Now to me this is just wrong. I started, a good while ago, in electronics testing and yes we did have people who sat with test gear and checked circuit boards gave the right voltages etc.; but we also had a test development team who built the test harnesses, scripts and tools. It is this second group in my option that equate to software testers - they are developers who write code to enable testing. They might do some manual testing but as much as possible this should be automated; we have computers available to us, so make them do the repetitive test work whenever possible. ...

February 3, 2008 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

First Alt.Net.UK Conference thoughts

I am sitting on the train heading north. After deciding trying to stream the England/Wales match from iPlayer on the train WiFi was probably not a good idea, especially after just reading the score, I though I should write about the Alt.Net UK Conference; a very interesting experience. It is great to meet so many people who are so enthusiastic over their jobs and learning how to do it better. There were some faces I knew from DDD and other community events, but also many new faces. I was surprised by the distance some people had travelled, I met a good few from around Europe, but I think Roy won the prize with a trip from Israel. ...

February 2, 2008 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Registration for SQLBits II

It seems there are still some places left for SQLBits II in Birmingham on the 1st of March. If you want to go I suggest you register fast as these community events do fill up fast.

January 31, 2008 · 1 min · Richard Fennell