Brian On Software

Starting this week, I’ll post a weekly post on recommended links to interesting, educating, and entertaining stuff concerning the world of software development and related technologies. Most of these links point to blog posts, published articles, podcasts, screencasts, news, etc., that I feel like sharing with my fellow developers at work and on this site. Without further ado, here are the week’s geek links for January 25th, 2008.

Blog Posts

• “TDD Anti-Patterns”
  Software developer James Carr shares his own catalogue of TDD Anti-Pattern. It’s a good complement to Gerard Meszaros’ “xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code” and pretty helpful in case you’re wondering whether or not your test harness is well written.
• “It’s fundamental: You are a programmer if you…“
  A lot of people are writing posts about the ‘conditions’ that must be met for being considered a ‘programmer’. In his post, Reg Braithwaite counters this by providing his own thoughts on what it really takes to be a real programmer…writing programs! Of course the spectrum between being a good programmer and a professional programmer is quite large, but as long as you know how to work with the ‘fundamentals’ associated to programming, I believe you’re on the right track. I strongly suggest you to read the comments linked to that post…it gets pretty interesting!

Articles

• “VS 2008: The Road Ahead”
  Roger Jennings writes about what .NET developers should watch for the next release of Visual Studio, code-named “Hawaii”. I was blown away with the quantity of new tools and technologies that are going to be delivered by Microsoft (mostly by Microsoft Research) in the next release of their premier .NET development toolset. Amongst these set of technologies related to the .NET platform, brace yourself for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with support for IronPython and IronRuby, Silverlight 2.0, ASP.NET’s Extensions, the F# programming language, PLINQ and Parallel FX, ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as ‘Astoria’), Eric Meijer’s Volta project (IMHO by far the most interesting project in the list), and more! Gee, I still haven’t jumped on the ASP.NET MVC, Enterprise Library, C# 3.5, WPF, XAML, WCF, WF, CardSpace wagon!
• “Designing an Entity Data Model”
  John Papa wrote an article covering the basics behind the Entity Framework and provides a good overview of the Entity Data Model in the next MSDN Magazine. I’m not a fan of using wizards to implement code, because I like to have control of my code and to know the mechanics behind the engine, but sometimes it does help to use them. In his article, John uses the Entity Data Model Wizard to generate a model from an existing database. So what? It’s still a good introduction to this new promising technology!
• “Introduction to Object Oriented Programming Concepts (OOP) and More”
  This is an article that was published in The Code Project on Jan.7th, 2008. Even though a huge number of articles, books and classes have been wrote and taught on this subject for the last 20 years, there are still some programmers who can benefit for more simple explanations on some concepts and principles related to OOP. I’m actually going to be teaching an introductory OOP class with C# and VB.NET in a couple of weeks, and this is one link that I’ll share with my students. The programming language used in this article is C#, but the concepts can easily be applied to Java, VB.NET, and other OO languages.

Podcasts

• “Develop with Passion like Jean-Paul Boodhoo“
  Craig Shoemaker, host of the Polymorphic Podcast, interviews Jean-Paul Boodhoo, a MVP and .NET developer from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. JP is one of my favourite blogger because he has this tendency to inject passion behind someone’s desire to become better as software craftsman. In this interview, JP explains in simple and humble words his experience as a software professional, how and why he changes the way he designs software instead of always applying the same pattern or principle without further investigation as to know if there’s a better way to design a software.
• “Dick Gabriel on Lisp”
  Dick Grabriel, a software scientist, poet and ‘code artist’ is being interviewed by my favourite software development podcast, Software Engineering Radio. As stated in the site, “In this episode, we’re talking with Dick Gabriel on Lisp. We started by looking at artificial intelligence as the historic context of Lisp, the goals AI tried to reach, and how Lisp was supposed to help reach those“.

Screencasts

For the C# and VB.NET language aficionados, there are two good screencasts about both of these languages:

• “Bill Wagner on Learning C#.NET From VB.NET”
  In this DNR TV episode, Carl Franklin does a one-on-one presentation with Bill Wagner, author of the excellent and highly recommended Effective C# book, about learning C#.NET from a VB.NET perspective.
• “Kathleen Dollard on Comparing C# and VB in .NET 3.5”
  And if it wasn’t enough, you can also watch Kathleen Dollard on dealing with the subject of comparing C# and VB.NET in the latest version of the .NET platform. This is the first of a two part series.

News

• The .NET Framework library source code is released!
  Yep, it’s finally here. You can now debug some parts of your application that directly uses the .NET Framework libraries within Visual Studio 2008. You can read more about this here, here, here, and here.

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