The testing anti-pattern

I've now finished my previous gig and the guys are busy chasing some recurring issues with the application. Because of its complex architecture, those issues are equally complex to understand and debug.

Most of the code in this application happens around things we cannot put under unit-tests, because they all rely on heavy integration: syncrhonization of data between tiers, integration with external RFID hardware and 3G modems, sqlce and its multiple connections issue, and other equally difficult things to debug without running the system with said external entities. As a result, our code coverage is very low, and while we do have fakes for most of those external entities, we have to think hard and strong about the value provided by tests relying on fakes, or we'd end up testing a fake implementation. Not very useful to say the least.

That made me think of some testing anti-patterns I see recurring a lot on various project, and I thought I'd highlight them. That will let me reevaluate my position in a year time, and I also know that some of the people still invovled in some of my projects are reading this blog, so it will serve as a constructive criticism for their next projects.

1. I'll paraphrase Chad Myers, code coverage is the new LOC/day. Code coverage doesn't ensure quality, and the percentage is just that, a number. It needs to be put into context of the project: some areas do not need unit tests because they don't provide value. If you chase 100% code coverage, you're on a wild goat chase and you should reevaluate your understanding of the value of code-coverage (beyond the marketing bullsh*t).
2. It is more important to have a code-base with low cyclomatic complexity and loose coupling than it is to have thousands of text. Evaluating code quality is not only about testing scenarios, it is also about maintainability, understandability, extensibility, etc. Use NDepend to understand where you need to refactor or rework part of the systems.
3. Finally, and more importantly, I see no value in spending time after your code is released to write unit tests for the sake of it. Because the code has already shipped, you should not do any refactorings to it (or you'd end up with changes that you'd need to re-deploy and re-test, in which case you'll have to ship again, it all becomes a virtuous circle). So you end-up putting code under tests without bringing much value at all (again, except for increasing code coverage, see 1). Unit testing is a tool *during development* that helps you shape your objects and functionality and refactor your code until you get a satisfying result. Writing code aftewards doesn't serve much purpose.

There you are. With the advances like BDD, the focus on unit tests and code coverage by management should hopefully die a much to be celebrated death, as the focus shifts to the real issue: shared knowledge and process, arriving at a common definition of the what and why, and let developers handle the how.

asp.net MVC presentation - the results are in!

The nice people at VBUG just sent me the result of the evaluation forms, and I am very pleased with the result, as a vast majority seems to have enjoyed the talk.

A couple of points were raised by an apparently unimpressed attendee, and as those forms are anonymous I thought I would take the time to provide some feedback here.

The font size was too small to read from the back

The font had been set to quite a big font size, added with a very large DPI. I'm afraid the length of the room compared to the size of the projector made it very difficult to accommodate everyone. If anyone has suggestions to reach to more people while still managing to put 30 characters in the wideness of the screen, I'd be very interested. Any experience from using different fonts? Maybe high contrast with dark background? I'd be quite interested in learning a few new tricks to make it work better.

That said, there were spaces on the front row, and I did ask everyone to confirm my font size was alright with them. I should have indicated this was a strong hint for people to reshuffle based on their sight :)

Discover powerpoint, where are the diagrams?

This one is quite accurate, I do not have powerpoint slides as a rule: unless I have something very compelling to show in a diagram I don't see a point in showing one. I had a slide introduction for the previous version of the asp.net MVC talk I did at DNUG, but I find them distracting and get the audience passive. Especially as for MVC I would end up showing either a product roadmap (I don't think it's my job) or a diagram of MVC, which in itself seems of poor value.

While pictures do speak a thousand words, I think code does speak more efficiently to most developers. So I'd be interested in knowing what people think. Do you prefer a screencast approach of demoing step by step what is going on, or have an introduction to the concept of MVC with nice diagrams, arrows, blocks and what not? I tried both and felt the tutorial approach worked better, but from the presenter side of things it's always difficult to make those judgement calls.

Lots of mistakes in the demo

Yeap, some glitches here and there happened. Some, like the exception thrown when a view is not found, were on purpose to demo a feature, some others were due to my poor typing. On an interesting note, when presenting just like when working, apologizing for something no one has complained about usually seems to trigger complains that otherwise would have been silent. From now on I think I'll stop apologizing for my typing errors and rely on my audience to correct me (which I really like because it means they're reading and understanding the code as I type it. Spot on!)

The examples were poor

Oh, I did like my Bingo game. I'm just sick and tired of the same stuff everyone does with Northwind / NotNorthwind / Southwind. Storefront is there to provide you with an end-to-end real demo and does it so well. I'll stick to my guns on that one, boring things are one of the reasons I don't work in the city anymore :)

Conclusion

What worries me slightly more is the discrepancy between speaker rates and overall session rates, which leads me to think the presentation itself was less than excellent. I think it really comes down to two issues: expectations should be managed to reflect the code-intensive nature of the presentation, and the content is probably slightly too complex, with too many points being presented, including containers, dependency injection, inversion of control, testability, c#, javascript, html, etc.

On the bright side, only one of you has not been satisfied by the content or the presenter, with 67% rating the session as Very Good or Excellent, and 72% rating me as Very Good or Excellent (see my head growing out of proportion!), so a massive thanks to all of you for making this the presentation I've enjoyed the most so far.

P.S. I seem to remember two people chatting and laughing away during parts of the presentation at the back of the room. A good thing I had my back to the audience the whole time or I would have given the eye. Presenters do put a lot of effort in preparing those sessions, if the content or the presenter doesn't interest you, I apologize for failing to make the subject interesting to you, but I'd rather you stayed quiet or left. The law of two feet should apply, even during a presentation.

asp.net MVC presentation

What an absolutely crazy week! I've been working flat-out all week and still have a mountain of TODO: all over my screen.

Thanks to everyone that came to the asp.net MVC presentation. It's a presentation I really enjoy and look forward to give it again to other user groups. I have the feeling that I'll finally be happy with the content the third time I deliver it. And suffice it to say that I'm working very hard to actually make the bingo.net game playable.

Apologies are in order as I'm late delivering the code (will get around to do it, probably around Tuesday) and the slides (slide.txt) and answering some of your emails. Please bare with me while I work through the backlog.

Alt.net UK Conference

Register now! http://altdotnet.org/events/5

Rewriting history?

I very often update and modify my posts until I feel they carry the meaning I intended. With English being a foreign language to me, there are many instances where my posts end-up being interpreted the wrong way or don't represent my message really well.

I'll be migrating this blog over to my own servers quite soon, and I've been wondering if all those edits should be done the way they are now, without history, or if I should adopt a more bliki approach and leave anyone to see the variations and edits I do on posts.

Does historic truth matters to you? Do you want to see my edits? Or do you only care about the end result?

Linq-to-Entities and me: Does what it says on the tin

For those not reading on the web, the subtitle of my blog is the result of a lovely name-calling session by an anon on this site. Proof that it works, another person has now proclaimed that I am indeed what it says on the tin.

The same blog argues that alt.net has turned into the nHibernate mafia, and that we all have a vested interest in nHibernate and are trying to defend our territory. One of the tenets of alt.net is to be pragmatic about the tools we use, and I've delivered projects with nHibernate, activerecord and linq2sql, and will use whichever tool works for the job. I don't have dogma for one tool over the other when they deliver what I need.

And to be absolutely clear, some of my clients will eventually, for better or worse, use the Entity Framework, and I'll have to use that tooling, be it that it fits or not in my personal practices.

On a more positive note, there's been some very interesting comments to my entry. I thought I'd highlight my understanding of the discussion so far. If I've misunderstood those arguments, feel free to respond in the comments or insult me by messenger, I'm always available.

Proponents of L2E argue that this new framework has been developed to provide the same tooling for modelling your entities across your different needs: reporting, data access, etc. As such, it should be seen as a tool that lets you re-use knowledge across models. Furthermore, it should not be understood as a tool to create global entities shared across applications.

This could very well be the case, and indeed bring benefits for people using Reporting Services and other data-centric tools that are apparently a pain. But if we see L2E as a tool, then for reasons that have been highlighted previously, they won't fit my toolbox because they do not support the development model I have adopted.

That said, other people still look affectionately at the idea of a global model for your application / applications. My projects tell me those models fail and my experience shows me that a DTO approach to boundary crossing is more effective.

I have expressed concerns at the fact that L2E has been at the core of  other frameworks (like ado.net data services), because it brings the fundamental idea that the same model could be exposed as a REST service, sent over a WCF service to another windows client, and put in a can of Coke to the moon. Doing each of those things represents a completely different set of challenges, each with a different model. Maybe if LinqToEntities could fit in my toolbox, I could reuse it to model every single of those different entities I need to have for each boundary in my application. But I don't believe the power of the designer is going to solve any of my issues, and will probably introduce more.

I stay unconvinced but I'm overall happy to realize that many proponents of linq2entities have an understanding of the issues with a unique entity data model and with sharing of models.

The Entity Framework - don't get fooled in what is wrong about it

[edit: modified text slightly to more accurately reflect my point and remove references to Julia being fooled, which apparently has been interpreted as Julia being a fool. Apologies.]

I'm off to bed, but thought I'd end up the day on a note. There are many flaws in the programming model adopted by the Entity Framework and they've been documented enough. But this is not what makes me cringe the most.

The Entity Framework team responds to the vote of no confidence by proposing fixes to programming issues in v2, talks of openness in the design of the next version, and have got people thinking that we object with the programming model. They even suggest that it's alright for Microsoft to deliver a tool that violates best practices established by people that built real systems.

[edit: I don't believe this is done with malicious intent, but I do believe there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the arguments that have been put forward, both by the EF team and their supporters and by the signatories of the letter]

The idea that a conceptual model can represent everything for everyone through designer-generated angle-bracket files is the issue. The fundamental of selling your product as one model crossing tiers and being standardized to all is a sweet dream that will end up biting anyone getting in contact with such a system. When Microsoft says transparently, I hear painfully.

The EF team explain how to fix the syntactic sugar without addressing the elephant flaw in the model is equivalent to telling people disagreeing with the one conceptual model to rule them all that they're just nitpicking over syntax. It's quite amazing that the people voicing their anxiety at the ripple-effect of introducing EF are being discarded as a small minority of weirdos that shouldn't complain because their way is not being adopted until v2. The reality is that a majority of those people are leading the industry in interesting directions discovered through experience and reflection, and their ripple effect is wide. . There is no wonder why TDD and BDD (and DDD and DDDD and all those acronyms I hate so much because of their opacity) all started with a couple of people, not with a couple of tools and designers.

Microsoft has a responsibility, because of its size, to not screw the people that are trying to promote a better craft. When those people react to a technology like they have with the Entity Framework, they should be listened to, because by delivering yet another monster (sharepoint anyone?), Microsoft may generate business but in the process degrade the overall quality of their development ecosphere. In the long term that may just end-up killing them, as the market will decide on better, simpler and more efficient tools. It's the law of two feets. But this movement takes years and impacts everyone that has to maintain a system.

As for Entities, they exist as several transpositions adapted to not only the programming model but also the context in which you use them. My notion of a user and your notion of a user only share a couple of trivial rules. If you ever, ever try to come up with one model that covers everything, you'll be too flexible or not enough, and your project, and the projects depending on your project, will fail. Full stop. It's been tried and tested. It is wrong. Like putting mustard in your corn flakes.

[updated for clarity and minor adjustments]

Jesus is back and His name is... svn?!?

Picture worth a thousand bibles.

Linq2sql running on Sql Compact Edition - calling on VistaDb to clean-up their act

There is a lot of misunderstanding on this subject. Even competitors of Microsoft seem to not understand fully what Linq2sql is made of or what it actually covers. One of these competitors is Vistadb that says on their product comparison:

SQL CE users will have to wait until the Entity Framework release before they can use LINQ against a SQL CE database.

I sent them an email to warn them that their comparison was erroneous, and an exchange has started in which they've assured me I was in the wrong and have neither acknowledged the confusion nor updated their comparison. As such I feel inclined to bring the conversation to the community, to get knowledge out there. I have not received their authorization to reproduce the exchange, so I'll have to represent as accurately as I can, in my own word, the different points they made. And I hereby invite them, and you dear reader, to the conversation.

Before you begin reading this, please note I do like the work the vistadb guys have been doing, I think it's a great internal database, and I probably would use their product still. But with greatness comes responsibility yada yada.

There is no provider model in linq2sql

This is an easy mistake to make if you don't spend your time in reflector. Linq2sql *has* a provider model that has been marked as internal late in the process, as described on the Wayward Weblog. If I was to guess the reasoning, I'd guess that there would've been a conflict of interest for partners to support both the Titanic Entity Framework model that leverages updates to the core ado.net classes and a provider model where they would've had to rewrite the sql code generation from the ground-up in linq2sql.

But I would concede that, as it's not public, for all intent and purposes, there is no provider model *you can build against*.

Linq2Sql gives you a Visual Studio GUI and a mapping tool

This is accurate, and very relevant to our conversation. There is several aspects to linq2sql.

• A provider model, with a provider implementing access to Sql Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, as well as Sql Compact Edition 3.5. This is the bit of code responsible for translating between the model and the sql code
• An abstract mapping model defining types such as MetaTable, MetaType and MappingSource, that let you implement different mappings. Linq2sql ships with two of those, one for xml mapping files, one for attributes.
• Visual studio ships with a designer that lets you generate an xml mapping file through a point-and-click UI. This only supports the full-fledge Sql Server, and this is where the confusion may be coming from.

So there is a bit more than a GUI and a mapping tool. It's a GUI, a mapping model and a provider model.

Sql Compact Edition queries don't support Linq, the compiler does

Well I've struggled quite a bit to understand that one. Linq queries are compiled by the compiler as extension methods or interfaces defined by the implementations of Linq (Xml, object, Sql, etc). However, I fail to see any connection with Sql Ce itself, as the one querying the database is the provider that, indeed, supports Linq2sql just fine. The provider is indeed distributed with Sql Ce 3.5.

Microsoft does not use Linq2sql as a term that covers Sql Compact Edition and it's unsupported

I don't see how it relates to the technical conversation. And the download page of Sql CE 3.5 specifies the following.

SQL Server Compact 3.5 introduces a host of new features including LINQ to SQL support

Again, it doesn't seem like unsupported to me.

Conclusion

Vistadb is a strong product in its own right. The product comparison however contains a mistake and the company hasn't responded to the two emails I've exchanged with a catchall email address.

All in all, this highlights two points. Microsoft has a communication problem around Linq2sql; Iif your competitors don't understand your product well, imagine your customers. Secondly, if you want to put product comparisons you should *really* double-check your facts. Responding in person to emails rather than through a customerservices@... address, and double-checking before responding the second time would probably have kept me a bit happier.

The Entity Framework paves the way to years of uneducating the masses

This is in substance the bitter taste that's left in my mouth as EF v1 gets ready to be released.. I've been debating on this topic in user groups, meetings and within my clients: adopting EF as it stands would be a mistake as it introduces fundamental issues in the way we write code and in the way we design our architectures. We will spend years undoing the massacre done by introducing that technology as it stands, just like we still have to suffer DataSets today.

That's why I signed the ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence.

And today, it was announced that the Entity Framework team would adopt a transparent process in the same way as the ado.net data services team has. In this respect I'll have to remark that the ado.net data services team took the decisions they wanted to take, even when the community advised against them.

Furthermore, the objections that were made against the Entity Framework have been around for a while and apparently didn't make it into the V1.

I'll try and have an open and positive attitude towards this opening-up, but I'll notice that already there's a push within MS to adopt the entity framework everywhere. If you push for adoption of your v1 in the company and respond to criticism by promising to fix  fundamental scenarios in v2, you're doing more damage than good, and this is why I have a trust problem vis-a-vis the Entity Framework and its design team.

A real 3d-enabled web browser for WPF?

I know, some of you think that the browser control in the latest WPF 3.5 SP1 is the dog's bollocks. Sadly, it suffers from its origin as a wrapper around good old GDI and the lack of GDI redirection imposed by supporting WPF in Windows XP environments.

One thing I keep track of very closely is what the mono guys do. This is a fantastic pool of resources, skills and code, and if I had time to hack I'd probably join one of their many projects. And on their feed I came across Alp's post describing a WebKit-based 3d web browser. I can't wait to have a play with the code.

Technorati Tags: mono,c#,wpf,webkit

Alt.net London Beers #2 - 17th of June 2008

It's this time of the month again, and we continue with the tradition of organizing alt.net beers events monthly.

As usual, it's casual, it's about chit chat on alt.net things and its about beer.

The venue has kindly reserved a couple of tables in their upstairs bar where we'll be having some food and of course beer.

Don't hesitate to mail the details around, the more the merrier!

The Blue Posts
18, Kingly Street
London W1B 5PX

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Technorati Tags: alt.net,London,altnetbeers,altnetuk

NxtGenUG PreFEST08 Dinner & Fest08

NxtGenUG is the most thriving user group community around. They're organizing a dinner tonight, so come and join if you're around Reading (only 29 minutes on the train from London)

And of course, tomorrow is a day of pure geekiness with the Fest08 event in Reading. Come say hi!

Hello twitter?

Craig has been selling me twitter over the last few months and I always kept it on the back of my mind. From this morning twitteroo is installed and I'll be able to start moaning on my twitter feed about the poor QoS as soon as I get it. Right now it just looks like a web-based IRC to me.

Side note, when is too much information too much? Mailing lists, messenger (and often during the day visitors of this blog chatting away, usually introducing themselves with asdf or the time-proven testing), maybe I'm overcommitting?

Agile smell

Anthony talks about a potential agile smell and the concept of self-organizing teams. As with his brother's blog, I still can't figure out how to post a comment so it ends up on my blog. If I was to bother with putting categories on my entries, I'd probably have one specifically for commenting on other posts when I've been too dumb to find the reply or the register button.

Let's first separate Agile (as an enforced, recognized and lucrative book publishing business, as well as quite a bit of ego and a general lack of understanding or intelligence in applying the ideas), agile (as a bunch of methodologies you pick and choose from to try and get as many benefits as you can out from what others have spent years experimenting with, and that we alt.netters would consider the pragmatic choice), post-agile as a poorly worded (imho) variation of pragmatism, and scrum (as one particular self-organizing methodology, one of the most popular but also one of the most badly applied). They each represent different things and different steps you can and should follow in becoming more agile, and everybody should try to get more agile even when not wanting, refusing or considering being past the stage of, Agile.

Back to Anthony's post. He talks about a "conflict" with someone telling him that he should have chosen a story to pick on his own because teams are self-organizing, and Anthony argued that without prioritizations he should ask before committing to the work.

I'm not entirely sure which variance of agile that company is using, but here's what we do here. Stories are written on the wall and are negotiated with the client, and doesn't involve the dev team much at the early stage outside of simple feasibility study (when we're lucky). They get used for us to produce both the scenarios for the tester's acceptance criterias and the product backlog.

The product backlog is the one being prioritised: high-level functionality cards of a couple of days, and the prioritization is done by us from the knowledge we extract painfully from the project managers. Sometimes they even come and do it themselves, but sadly that's as common as a solar eclipse.

From this, we commit at the beginning of the sprint to the amount of work we think we can deliver. After a couple of sprints we know roughly from our estimates how many virtual hours we deliver per sprint, aka how many of the hours we have estimated we manage to deliver. This is usually quite accurate even though the number itself doesn't mean much at all.

The team is self-organizing from that point because the *team* has committed to the *whole* of the sprint backlog. If we had over-committed we would've de-scoped. In that sense, at the stage of a daily stand-up, I'd agree that a team member asking what to do next is usually a practice smell:

• Priorities of tasks mostly don't exist as we're committed to all of them
• The ones that need to be worked on first are based on dependencies rather than priorities. If you ask you probably forgot what depended on what. With short sprints, that's the last thing you would forget when you've spent 3 or 4 hours deciding all of those on the Monday.

We use the wall for roughly clustering tasks that are inter-dependent, and the bottom of the wall for the nice-to-have. When you commit to a task, you commit to the team that you're wishing to do a task, so you probably don't have a reason to ask for permission.

The final thing that I've experimented on my latest project is to decouple the sprint backlog maintenance and the daily stand-up. It's now a real-time wall: you add, remove, complete and reshuffle tasks when you feel like it, the wall is visible and people will see the changes as they happen. The daily is a summary of all those movements: this relieves the pain of updating the wall, makes it more entertaining, and no one asks what to do next because they've either not finished their current task yet or they've already chosen their new one.

Being agile share many of the tenets of alt.net: flexibility, lookout for the best solution, pragmatism. In that respect I'll agree with Anthony that an Agile Anal can be annoying. But on the other hand (and I'll leave that to another post), only the teams that tried and mastered Agile can allow themselves to deviate to agile. If you've not tried hard enough a change in mentality in the way you work, you will fail, and what some would call "adapted agile" I call "bad habits are back".

[Updated: s/Jason/Anthony]

Pdc2008 here I come

One of the first thing I did this morning was to make sure I had registered for the 2008 edition of the Pdc.

Any brits travelling to LA or any alt.net guys want to organize an unconf, let me know.

Now they need to open the registration for TechEd Europe and I'll be booked for the year.

Technorati Tags: pdc2008

Retrospective on my asp.net MVC talk

I'm publishing this a bit late, but I took a few days (a whole two of them) without working. How refreshing!

In an effort for a more transparent process, here are a few things I think went well and didn't go too well. If you've been at the talk I would absolutely love your criticism. Practice makes perfection, but before that it makes for nicer presentations and a less worried Sebastien!

Preparation god damn it!

The font-sizes were all wrong in everything but the code-editor, this is quite unacceptable and certainly not like me at all. So be prepared if you install vs 2008 SP1 beta, it will reset all your settings. That explains the lack of proper configuration in visual studio. And of course, a problem never comes alone, vs refuses to start under my Presentation account that is set with ridiculously large DPI setting. But it all comes down to me installing this stuff too late, which left me no time to make sure everything was configured properly. Apologies to the audience, I should have had a VM up-and-ready with all my content. And apologies to myself for installing a beta service pack on my main development machines.

Tools

All the usual presentation tools were not installed on that laptop either, so no ZoomIt and no Keyboard Jedi. Again, with a reinstall of vista a couple of days before, I just didn't have the time to get it right.

One thing I find difficult is choosing a screen mode. When showing code, I want to show you my Visual studio and whatever other programs get spawned by it (ie, firefox, the command prompt) while still seeing them on my screen. For powerpoint, I want to keep presenter-specific stuff from your eyes (a timer, some notes, and in general the whole content of the slide you'll see appearing as I talk).

I need a hybrid between Clone and Span modes. I may have something working, so my next talk will guinea-pig the idea. I'll blog about it after trying it out. :)

Not having slides...

Some people didn't completely see how the asp.net MVC and the REST part of the talk connected together, and maybe I should've introduced that at the beginning on the slides. But if you know me, I don't like slides and will avoid them at all costs.

This is the first talk I give where I put some content on slides, to refresh everyone on MVP and MVC and how the models differ. I like how visual it makes the explanation, but I'd rather manage to do it graphics only, with no text whatsoever. That requires more work, a tiny bit of animation and very good graphics. Nothing that can't be done with enough time for pimping it up.

Body language

I used the MacBook remote to change slides, and the freedom to move around to move slides is next to none. I also find that having the remote to hold from the tips of my fingers helps me avoid leaving my hands hanging. Hold something to keep your hands at chest level, it puts your body language into explanation mode. Relax and put one hand in your pocket and you switch to opinion mode.

Eye contact is the best tool to calm anxiety. You'll always find a couple of people in the audience being very expressive, that lets you judge the rhythm of the presentation. There's nothing worse than an expression-less audience.

Messy content

I'm a bit in-between two waters on this one. The whole point of the talk was to see what toolkits you can use today to do REST applications, but, for various reasons, I fit in there an introduction to asp.net MVC as a first part. That just doesn't flow well, and I think I'll split those two in two different presentations: asp.net MVC introduction (I have some AJAX stuff to make that presentation complete), and REST today, rest tomorrow. They can both stand on their own feet, and it would leave me more time for doing what I prefer doing: talking rather than coding and rushing.

I'm not funny

I tend to make jokes during the talk, they're usually completely spontaneous, but they fall flat every time, except for a few friendly grins from people I've met or talked to before. I shall prepare my jokes in advance and only use them after having tested them. But not on animals.

Speak more slowly

My voice level seems to be alright, but I speak too fast. And I have those pet words that creep in, amongst them "I think" (very annoying one I have a lot of problems getting rid of, even in day-to-day conversation), and Ok (very patronising, hate it, think I managed to mostly kick it off my presentations).

It's quite funny how the brain gives you those little fetish words. I think they creep-in because they trick your brain think there's a rhythm to what you're saying, when simple punctuation and sentences should be enough. It may also be the case that they give your brain enough time to reformulate when you're mid-sentence and unsure about what to say next. Again, preparation is the key.

Have different solutions, not different projects

This one bit me during the presentation. As I prepare the code for all the major steps, I end up with the same project at different stages, and I made the mistake of keeping all the projects in the same solution, often resulting in the wrong code being ran when pressing F5 and the wrong files being shown when I expected to show some code.

From now on, I'll keep all the projects in separate solutions.

Conclusion

I really like giving talks. It is a bit frustrating to come up with new material every time and only use it once, as you don't get the opportunity to retrofit what you learnt from presenting it once. Hopefully that will change as I get new speaking opportunities.

Presenting at the London .net User Group: Put your webforms to REST - how to build rest-y architectures with .net

What:
With the raise of the web 2.0 meme, more and more web applications claim to support REST architectures. We'll explore together what is REST and what is not, and how we can write a testable web application that supports the REST concepts on the asp.net platform, with a code-intensive overview of current toolkits (asp.net MVC and others).

Where:
MRM Worldwide London
76 - 80 Southwark Street , Bankside Studios, London SE1 0PN

When:
Tomorrow Wednesday the 21st of May, 18:30

Why:
This, I have no idea of :)

That is, if I get Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installing properly on my demo laptop, which is no small feat in itself, or face a frantic rewrite of some of the presentation tomorrow.

Reflecting on my last project

Today is a day off, as I've accumulated 36 hours of work between Monday and Tuesday and needed some rest. The last project I've been working on has been one of the most interesting I've had in a long time, not only because I took more responsibilities than usual, being both a lead dev and as a scrum master, but because of the amount of technology we've fetched in one app. To give a quick run-down:

• Fluid database design with an object-based linq2sql database (no dbml file and no sql files in the whole project)
• Sql Compact Edition
• ado.net synchronization services to sync to a central database, and hopefully the sync framework for multi-party syncrhonization
• WPF all the way, with a ViewModel way of developing
• Castle stack, for Windsor and a bit of DynamicProxy2 love
• 3G support for an always on experience

I've learnt quite a few things in the process, so here's a few reflections for my own benefits.

• When you don't know what you're building, you're going to have a hard time knowing when it's done
• Working under pressure can be fun, but it's exhausting and it does highlight a failure in the planning part. We're getting better but we're nowhere near there yet
• It's fun to see people with a background go around in WPF. It always starts quite code-centric and evolves into more XAML as time goes by
• I still don't see people using Blend for anything meaningful. There's a wide range of reasons why, from crashes to not liking esoteric Xaml to the recording model. It doesn't go down well with either populations right now, at least as far as WPF is concerned.
• The only reasonable way to monitor the correct use of patterns and abstractions is to do it continuously. Not paying attention to the code base and coming back with changes weeks later is not a good idea, and a complete failure on my part. I need to get better at agreeing, explaining and enforcing design decisions.
• No one can work on several projects within a company and stay focused. This doesn't work at all. From now on, I will flat out refuse to work on  something else in the same day. If you want my time for two projects, my minimum time unit will be a day. Interruption decreases my productivity so much it's unreasonable, and the project (and my nerves) suffer.
• Frameworks that hide all of their internal implementation suck big time. Understanding object tracking in linq2sql is not easy or enjoyable, and bite you. Badly.
• Frameworks that show all of their internal implementations suck big time. Castle Windsor (at least RC3) throws exceptions in all the wrong places, and make dealing with registration more painful than it needs to be (when it works at all).
• Designers and UE people *need* to be involved throughout the process, and work on the same stuff as the rest of the team. The way people think they can go off and work on the UE or the design on their own schedule, with only validation from tech (when they don't send the work done the day before a release) is driving me absolutely insane. This doesn't work for them (we can tell them how much more flexibility they can have in their own design), it doesn't work for us (they provide diagrams of stuff we've already delivered, or stuff that is completely limiting the capacities of the platform). It's the typical waterfall model, and fall and fail it usually does.
• Someone needs to wake up and realize that the technology is not there to support the design, and the design is not there to put a nice face on technology. They're two sides of the same silver coin, they need to work together to deliver. That's what Apple does and it works great.
• I'm always amazed at how little is still invested in most of my clients companies around supporting other development teams. With a core team of a couple of peoples working to support other teams and evangelize the company's infrastructure, any company would save *so much time* on all other projects, from enforcing good standards, deployment procedures, automation etc. Think a few weeks per project.

Overall, a very good project, a great team and a freedom that I don't have very often with clients. I think it'll be difficult to move to my next project, the comparison will suffer!

alt.net drinks moved, only slightly

Got a message from Catriona, and the original location for our alt.net beers event was fully booked, so it's now around the corner from the previous location. See the original post for the details.