During my geekSpeak screencast last week, one of the attendees asked: Any recommendations for refactoring existing code to insert interfaces? (e.g., what's the best dependency to break first, the database?) Excellent question! Most of us do not have the luxury of working on greenfield projects, but...

Today at lunch* I'll be joining Glen Gordon and Lynn Langit on geekSpeak to talk about Taming Your Software Dependencies. Specifically I'll be talking about moving from tightly-coupled to loosely-coupled architectures using dependency inversion, dependency injection, and inversion of control...

My latest article just hit the web in the March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine. Loosen Up: Tame Your Software Dependencies for More Flexible Apps takes you on a journey from a highly-coupled architecture, which we're all familiar with, to gradually more loosely-coupled ones. First stop is the problems...

The "in breakfast there are chickens and there are pigs" analogy is a popular one in Agile circles. It refers to the idea that in a given project there are people who are fully committed (pigs, developers) and people those who are merely invested (chickens, stakeholders). I take issue with...

Its true. Too much money is available to IT. As a business with too much money assigned to an IT budget, you’re allowed to have teams completely fail, miserably, and when they do, you just throw more money at it. Lack of money isn’t the problem. The failures will still exist. Mediocre developers can...

I had this conversation with some friends on Twitter about a month ago and have been thinkinng about it ever since. We are all professionals, but professional what? I have come to the conclusion that I am a problem solver. That’s my business. Whether its process management, software architecture...

I'm preparing a chunk of code for open source release in January. Among many other things it has a persistence layer wrapper with a "provider" for NHibernate, yet another validation framework, and a few goodies for building smart clients. It's not dissimilar to Ayende's Rhino Commons...

I finally set up a googlecode project to host source code for the various things I have been doing over the last year. The first major significant contribution is of course the code drop that I promised a week ago now!! The application is the start of what I hope will evolve to be a great learning resource...

Over on the altnetconf list the question arose as to where you start when implementing agile within an organization. The first thing to bear in mind is that you probably want to avoid implementing all the practices, at the same time. This is likely to cause you to fail, because your attention will be...

Why is deployment so hard? Where is my Agile deployment?! Chad Myers wrote about using XML configuration and stored procedures to monkey patch fixes in the production environment on the ALT.NET mailing list: Talk about dysfunctional, but we’ve learned to use these XML files, sprocs, and other coding...