December 2007 Entries

Early this year I posted on some of the things that I wanted to concentrate on during 2007.  Like any good iteration, I feel the need to wrap it up with a retrospective.  Here are the things that I wanted to get done and how I felt I did on them. 1) I will set aside time to review code that I wrote in past years.  Well, I didn't do a lot of this, but it did happen.  I didn't dig back into the archives more than 2 or 3 years as those projects seemed to show enough change...

While we were down in Austin at the Alt.NET Open Spaces conference people suggested the use of a newsgroup to maintain conversations that we had started.  Running on a euphoric high from the session on DDD (or maybe it was something that I caught from passing around the 'putty stick') I signed up.  Looking back, I don't think that I had high expectations.  I only expected what was announced; a place for conversations to continue.  That said, my experience in Austin also showed me that there were so many truly passionate people with different thoughts and ideas on any one...

This was originally posted at www.victoriacodecamp.com/blog.  I'll be out in Victoria on January 26th 2008 speaking on Parachuting Into Brownfield Applications and on C# 3.0 Beyond Linq. A common term in software development is 'greenfield'.  The term is commonly used to describe a project that is starting completely from scratch and thus having no existing code base.  Recently I have been searching for a term that is capable of describing the opposite of greenfield.  One of the terms that is often used to describe code that exists is 'legacy'.  Unfortunately the term 'legacy' has connotations that lead people to think about applications...

A few months ago some of the members of Edmug made noises that they wanted to work on a project that allowed them to give back to the community (a greater community than just the developer one we know so well).  After mentioning this to some people in Microsoft, we were hooked up with a group that was looking for some software to be built and the Kassandra project was born.  These folks are teachers and administrators at a school that helps educate people with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.  When we were initially connected they were teaching some of...

I'm starting a new gig right now and one of the sweet things about it is that I'm going to be working in .NET 3.5 straight off the bat.  Hopefully I'll have some more time to blog about things to do with the framework and the language over the next number of weeks. Because of the normal process that most companies seem to have for assimilating new people to a team, I spent a couple of days with no direct network access.  Instead of just reading the documentation, I wanted to get some code written so that I could...

Long after the end of DevTeach Vancouver 07 I am wrapping it up.  Like Kyle, I have a sense of obligation to do this post.  That's not to say that DevTeach wasn't fantastic, but I feel I must report on my observations of the nerd herd. Observation #1:  No matter how temperate Vancouver is, some yahoo from a tropical island will show up and complain that it's freezing.  We really should have played "Guess who's jacket Kyle's wearing" through the whole week. Observation #2:  Kyle looks remarkably like Schroeder from Charlie Brown's Christmas, Scott dances like he was...