Uncategorised

I was at SQLBits II in Birmingham yesterday, a great venue and great sessions. I particularly enjoyed András Belokosztolszki’s session on transient data in SQL, giving an insight on when as a developer it is appropriate to use different techniques to manage data. My session on Visual Studio for Database Professionals seemed to be well received. However, I did sense some resistance from people (who I assume were DBAs as opposed to developers) who did not like the idea of a world where DB schema control is not done from within SQL Management studio, but with a revision controlled off line environment. Maybe some DBAs don’t want to be part of the larger developer family on a project? ...

I have been doing some Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) development in Word of late, not exactly a pain free experience. First thing to say is that even given all the marketing spiel, VSTO is not that different from VBA in older versions of Office. To get going I create a new VSTO 2008 Word 2007 Template project based on an import of our old Word template (to get styles, layout etc.). I then basically cut and pasted the logic from our old VBA macros into an ActionPane in the new one and it just worked. ...

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.

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. ...

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.

Vote early vote often……

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. ...

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.

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.

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. ...