I'll be attending the AltNetConf . Convenient for me that it's in Austin, TX. It's an open space conference, and I consider it the founding conference of a conversation that is "Alt.Net". I'll be proposing the topic: What are the Alt.Net principles? . The definition of Alt.Net...

Technologies are coming and going faster than every before. In this environment, how can we provide companies with a good return for their software investment. Looking back, J2EE was all the rage. Software executives were banking on J2EE and making significant investments. The same thing happened with...

I have learned an important lesson from my combined experiences at all the places I've worked. That is: raw requirements cause waste. A term I've used (and have heard others use) is that requirements are either "baked" or "not baked". For a development team to plan an iteration...

Overview of Exceptions There are quite of a few things that are just laws of Object-Oriented development, and one of those is that exceptions should be avoided. If you can prevent an exception from being thrown, do it. In the world of managed runtimes, particularly Java's JRE and .Net's CLR, objects...

Brian Button from the patterns and practices team gave a session bright and early Friday morning that was great. He covered how to write frameworks. What’s interesting is that he focused on writing frameworks as a non-technical problem since he’s seen too many frameworks that solve the wrong problem...

Not long ago, Jeremy Miller released version 1.0 his excellent dependency injection tool, StructureMap . I've ported it to .Net 2.0, and I've added generics to the bread and butter class, ObjectFactory. Download the . Net 2.0 release on sourceforge.net . StructureMap supports creating very loosely coupled...

In this post, I'll talk about and demonstrate integration testing. If you are just starting out with integration testing, you want to test small before you test big. Full-system tests are good, but if they fail, they don't give much of a hint as to where the failure is. Smaller integration tests will...

It's a great read: Team Smells...Refactoring For A Better Tomorrow (Part Two) and if you missed the first one: Team Smells...Refactoring For A Better Tomorrow (Part One)

We all know about code smells, but Blake Caraway is defining some team smells . Great post!