Brian On Software

Last year, Grady Booch was invited to give a talk at Yahoo! on the present state and the future of software development.  Entitled "The Promise, The Limits, The Beauty of Software", he clearly shares some remarks and insights about his experience as a software craftsman throughout his career and the industry.  The video is about an hour long, but very insightful.  If you’re not accustomed to reading books about software development in general, I think you will gain a lot by watching this one.

At this year’s TechEd conference, Juval Löwy was interviewed on the principle of interface-based programming vs coding to abstract classes.  Not many .NET developers know the difference between an interface and an abstract class, and even less when and why to prefer one to the other (hhmmm…sounds to me like a good post to write soon).  If you didn’t get a chance to hear his full talk on the subject at Tech Ed 2008, I strongly suggest to invest 16 minutes today to watch this interview.

Great news from Kyle Baley’s blog on Code Better this week!

There’s a new online service dedicated to provide various video tutorials (10 minutes or less) focused entirely on software development and technologies.  It seems to be like a YouTubish version for GrokTalks.  Not a bad idea!

Bookmark or check out DimeCasts.NET for more information.

My favorite podcast related to software development, Software Engineering Radio, recently interviewed Anders Hejlsberg, Chief Language Strategist at Microsoft.  Here’s an excerpt on this interview:

In this episode we have the pleasure of talking to Anders Hejlsberg, Chief Language Strategist at Microsoft. We started by discussing his more distant past, namely, his involvement with Turbo Pascal and Borland’s Delphi. We then looked at the influences Delphi had on C# and how C# evolved from Delphi. In the next section we discussed a couple of general language design issues, among them components and checked vs. unchecked exceptions. Next, we discussed interesting issues about languages of the future, static vs. dynamic typing, functional programming, meta programming as well as the importance of good support for concurrency. We concluded the discussion by looking at the interplay between languages and IDEs.

Click here to download this interview (MP3).

About a year ago, Krzysztof Cwalina gave a presentation on Designing .NET Class Libraries at Microsoft Research.  This is not your typical tech talk…it’s actually three hours long and the content goes in great depth, covering various practices and guidelines to consider when programming with the .NET Framework.  I sure learned a lot of things about the framework and what to watch out for in my next .NET project, such as knowing which interface to implement in a given context, which attributes to decorate my class with in certain conditions and the reasons for it, etc.

If you have read Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina’s excellent book “Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries” (the second edition is coming out later this fall!), this tech talk will surely complement what you have learned, since he recalls some of the ideas in the book.  Furthermore, there is also an accompanying PowerPoint presentation which is in sync with the video so you can take notes while watching it.

Just to give you a glimpse of what Krzysztof is talking about in his talk, here is a summary of his “Top 5 Things to Focus On When Designing APIs“:

1. Treat Simplicity as a Feature
2. Know Your User
3. Think Development Ecosystem
4. Use the Power of Consistency
5. Design to Last

This is a great tech talk to listen with your co-workers as you learn together the pitfalls to avoid and the tips to remember when designing an API with .NET.

Here’s a treat for your ears. If you are like me and didn’t attend this year’s OOPSLA conference (doh!), you might be glad to know that you can download the keynotes and tutorials for free!  As stated in the OOPSLA website:

The different episodes include coverage of notable tutorials, workshops, technical papers, essays, invited talks, and Onward! Events.

Co-produced by the excellent Software Engineering Radio, you can download and listen to the following keynotes in your car, at the gym, in the bus to work/school, etc.

• Peter Turchi on The Challenge of Telling the Next Story
• Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users
• Frederick Brooks on Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design
• David L. Parnas on Software Documentation: Making Object Orientation Work Better (my favorite in the list)
• And others…

There are also a bunch of episodes that were recorded prior to the conference in which the following speakers were interviewed for their tutorials:

• No Silver Bullet with guests Dennis Mancl, Steven Fraser, and Bill Opdyke
• The Ruby programming language with guest Glenn Vanderburg
• Software Architecture with guest Michael Stal
• Agile Unlimited with guest Jens Coldewey
• Security with guest Gary McGraw
• Domain-Specific Modeling with guest Juha Pekka-Tolvanen
• Agile Software Development on a Global Scale with guest Jutta Eckstein
• Unit Testing Patterns with guest Gerard Meszaros (my favorite in the list)
• And others…

And while I’m on it, if you’re looking for a place to listen and learn more about software engineering subjects online, I urge you to go to the Software Engineering Radio’s website. It has, IMHO, the best podcasts on software development today.