Great news, last Friday. James Shore announced that he'll put the entire contents of the book 'The Art of Agile Development' online. And, according to him, it's going to be

... conveniently cross-referenced and hyperlinked. A new section will be released every Friday, starting with the practices in Part II.

Awesome :)

According to Scott Ambler

RUP, [if] done right, is agile and [...] RUP encapsulates much of the advice needed to scale agile techniques successfully.

Since I always considered RUP an embodiement of the Waterfall misconception, wrapped in a nice marketing cover, especially after IBM got its hands on it, I was a bit sceptic about that claim.

Being very fond of agile software development, I considered RUP the enemy. I kept comparing RUP to Scrum and thought: "Mmm, RUP has so many silos. All these disciplines will never lead to an agile team," and "What? Seperate phases? That sure sounds pretty waterfally to me," and "What's with all the artifacts; sounds like waste to me...".

But now I'm asking myself: "Might RUP be agile after all?" followed immediately by another question: "Does RUP needs to be agile?" After all, agile is as agile does and a great many of the principles promoted by RUP lean towards the agile side of town: iterative development, change embrace, cross-team communication.

So, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter if RUP is agile or not. It promotes well established best practices and promotes a lot of decent values; so, if applied in a thoughtful manner, it leads to better software. The latter is the only thing that matters to me in the end. Software that's of high quality and that actually solved the client's problems.

To enjoy grandparents, aunt, uncles and friends AND to leverage everything I'm reading in Steven Sandersons excellent book Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, I've set up a website dedicated to my little baby girl. Although this sounds pretty corny it's actually quite an elaborate scheme to get my geek on with my girlfriend's consent :)

The site uses APS.NET MVC 2.0 (beta2, but I'm swithing to RC today), Entity Framework and .NET 3.5 (my ISP doesn't run the 4.0 RC framework yet, so I can't use that). I'm also using a google-ish 'as few features as possible' approach and I'm doing it all test-first. This means I have to dive into Moq and Castle Windsor to properly test, stub and mock everything, but so far I'm enjoying the experience. The elegance of the repository pattern really appeals to me and the clean code and markup in my project gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think:
Geen Dag Zonder Evi (No days without Evi)
has a freshly taken and uploaded picture of my daughter every single day for as long as I can keep it up :P

I'm busy working through my book backlog. In case you're interested, these are the books currently on it:

• Developing more secure .NET 2.0 Applications Dominick Baier, an older one, but I think the info is still relevant
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin
• Agile Estimating and Planning - Mike Cohn
• PRO Asp.net MVC - Steven Sanderson - I'm reading this now and it's amazing. I'm no longer afraid of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control :P
• ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed - Stephen Walther - I need this to prepare for my MCPD exam for which no training guides exist yet...
• CLR via C# - Jeffrey Richter
• Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# - Robert C. Martin
• Windows Communication Foundation Application Development - Bruce Johnsson e.a.
• 3D Programming for Windows - Charles Petzold

If all goes well, these will be off the list long before summer :)

When debugging an ASP.NET on my new machine, I ran into the following weird situation: I started debugging a web application for which I had set some breakpoint in the global.asax.cs file, somewhere in the Application_Start handler.

Now that's about as early in the application you can set a breakpoint, but I had some configuration issues I was debugging. The strange thing was, the breakpoint was never hit by the debugger, ever...

Then I noticed that, contrary to what I was used to, Visual Studio did not show "(Running)" in its title bar... This was an indication the debugger had not attached itself to the development webserver properly. After some googling around I came accross the following site which solved the issue. Apparantly VS gets confused when IE8 is installed... strange.

This registry fix solved the problem!