Forwarding Address

I have officially moved my blog to http://shane.jscconsulting.ca

Post May & Pre June

Well May was a pretty good month. One of the items on my list that I couldn’t list publicly was that I wanted to make the transition to contracting. Well the good news is that I have successfully made the transition. I’ve started on my first one year contract and things are going great so far. The team itself is really good and even though it’s a bit early to say I think contracting is a better fit for me.

The switch to contracting actually has taken a lot of time and energy. That would be why things have been so dead around here and why I wasn’t able to complete all my goals for May.

May:

• Finished the Applying UML and Patterns book.
• Made the transition to contracting!
• Switched over to waking up at 5:30 AM.

June:

• Finish reading Refactoring to Patterns. This book won a Jolt award and I can see why after having read the first few chapters.
• Start swimming once a week in the mornings at a pool near me. This might require I wake up at 5 AM but that’s the price of getting healthy.
• Turn in my Time sheet on time!

Agile vs. Non-Agile

Jeremy Miller writes what I consider a very good article based on his DevTeach experiences (stop writing about DevTeach people! I already realized I missed an amazing experience! heh). It basically boils down to agile vs. non agile and mirrors a lot of my own personal beliefs.

Adding Logging using Windsor

Steven Rockart did a great little post on using Windsor Interception to add logging to your code without polluting the code with actual log methods.

There are definitely not enough posts like this that explain the true value of Windsor.. nice post Steven!

iBatis — Interesting Problem…

I had gotten to the point in my iBatis efforts where I was starting to look at how iBatis deals with referenced objects. So a simple example is an Order with a Customer. Now assume that your customer was a complex enough object that you wanted to keep it cached and use your cached version. The timing itself was a bit funny because it was at this point that an email arrived from the iBatis user email list. Someone else had this exact same question. Well not really the exact same question. He had found out that iBatis doesn’t do any sort of caching. They consider that outside of their realm. We’ve discussed a few possible solutions (none of which I like that much) and even have one suggestion we look into NHibernate.

I still believe that iBatis has a definite use in providing an easy to use mapping layer. I just need to put some thought into the best way to provide some caching ability.

Getting Bogged Down? Change things up…

I ran into a situation over the last few days where I’ve been having trouble implementing some functionality. It’s a fairly complex story I’m trying to complete (we use a modified Scrum process) and I’ve been banging my head against it. It got to the point where I’ve been a bit put off with it but at the end of the day it has to get done.

So today I decided to change my plan a bit. I grabbed a bunch of other smaller stories that are on the board and started on them. I was able to knock off quite a few of them and it improved my mood a lot. Now I feel that I’m ready to go back to the first story and get it completed.

I’ve done this before when I find myself getting bogged down. Taking a break and trying something different is always a good mood improver. And usually I find that when I go back to the original task my perspective has changed enough that I can find a good solution easier then if I had kept at it. Just make sure you give yourself enough time to complete the original task.

Weighing in on the WPF book debate.

Eric Sink recently commented on the book debate that’s started up.

Part of me agrees with Eric Sink. It is definitely in a developers best interest to have a deep understanding of what they are doing. But I’m also in the camp that thinks that software development has gotten so complex that I personally cannot afford to be a generalist. I need to be able to balance my family time, my work time and my education time. This means that I need to be a bit more focused on what I am learning. When it comes to something like building a Solid Core I will take the time and effort it requires to gain a deep understanding.

But WPF is not something that at this point I feel that I need to grok. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to play with it, and hopefully use it in a project. But for now my needs are going to be more a long the lines of “How do I use it to accomplish what I want” and based on what I’ve heard Unleashed is going to be a better fit for that need. In the future if/when I need to “grok” it I’ll look at my options at that point. Maybe the Petzold book will meet my needs. Maybe I’ll need to attend a course or maybe both.

So in the end I guess I’m just a fence sitter who sees a need for both types of books depending on the situation. I’m guess it’s a good thing that there are smart people out there writing both types of books.

FogBugz & Subversion

Well some good actually came from the TFS vs OOS/whatever war that is going on over in Ayende land. Ayende linked to an article on setting up FogBugz (Good!) to work with Subversion (Great!) so you can link check-ins to bugz.

This is one of the features of TFS that I was super jealous of. Now that I know there is a way to get the same functionality without TFS (I’ve tried it and I am not a big fan..) I’m a happy developer.

Singleton Serialization

One of the techniques that I’ve found to be of some value is the usage of class instances as enums. An example of this is…


public class MonitorType
{
    public static readonly class BenQMonitor = new        MonitorType("BenQ");
    public static readonly class SamsungMonitor = new        MonitorType("Samsung");
...


One thing I haven’t had to deal with yet was serializing one of these.

If you think about it though this would cause a problem though since de-serialization would cause a new instance to be created, when really you want your singleton instance. But thankfully this little problem has been solved via this little article. Good thing to keep in the back of your brain if you follow this enum approach (or any other approach where you would serialize a singleton.).

Jean-Paul gets CoDe-ified!

Congrats to Jean-Paul for getting CoDe-ified!. Another well done article that will hopefully inspire some as much as Jean-Paul’s earlier work inspired me.