Rubens Blog

'Art of Agile Development' available on line

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 :)

Is RUP agile? And, should you care?

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.

My ASP.NET MVC project

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

Book backlog

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 :)

Visual Studio 2005 not properly attaching the debugger after installing IE8

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!

libsndfile

Another day in Qt/CMAKE paradise. After having downloaded the sources for LMMS (instead of getting them from the Git repository) and opening the CMakeLists.txt file, which is a large buildscript, I had a little bit more succes.
Unfortunately, even though the compiler and the platform are detected correctly, CMAKE is unable to find libsndfile1:

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:119 (MESSAGE): LMMS requires libsndfile1 and libsndfile1-dev >= 1.0.11 - please install, remove CMakeCache.txt and try again!

Now, I have version 1.0.20 installed, and put the folder this library lives in, into the PATH variable (sic). Still, no luck >_<

CMAKE doesn't make me happy

I've been struggling with CMAKE all evening to get the LMMS project to open properly in QtCreator. I must be spoiled by the easy .NET solution-files or something... it all seems so terribly primitive to me. On the other hand, I guess that's what you get when you need to be platform agnostic... Also, I seem to have to put each and every single tool I install (GIT, Qt, CMAKE) in the PATH... Talk about a 'back-to-the-nineties-timemachine' feeling :(

Venturing in the world of Qt for a while

Ever since having watched a talk about the Qt platform I've been wanting to try it out. Since I don't really have a background in C and C++ there are some ostacles on my road to Qt that I have to overcome.

1) Syntax: the C++ syntax looks quite a lot like C#'s (I know it's the other way around actually) so that's not a big issue. I've also done some minor things in C (most notably the first 20 or so problems from Project Euler), so C++ doesn't look all that freaky. Nevertheless, doing OO in C++ will take some adjusting.
2) Ide: I've been programming in different version of Visual Studio for about 3 years now, but I do want to get to terms with the Qt Creator. I just found out that there's also a Visual Studio Plug in so I might give that a try as well.
3) Libraries: this will be the major change I'm going to face. I feel pretty much at home in the .NET framework; I know the major namespaces and what kind of stuff they contain. Most importantly I've grown used to the whole .NET idiom of Assemblies, Reflection, Events and what not. Finding out the Qt equivalents of it to really start programming into the language will be my greates challenge.
4) A project: I need a project to get me going. Now there are three ideas I'm goign to look into. I'm going to get a Nokia E71 next week, a nice smartphone running Symbian 60. I'd like to make a nice metronome application for that device. Second, I just found out that the LMMS is also done in Qt. So that's something worth looking into as well. Thidly, I'm thinking of creating an educational game togther with my mum, who recently graduated as art teacher.

All in all, it's a reasonable roadmap ahead of me:
1) Learn C++
2) Dive into Qt using one of my 3 projects
3) Get acquinted with the Qt platform more intimately.
4) Publish a nice usable Qt app :)

I'll keep you posted on my progress!

Please update your bookmarks

Since my focus is shifting from WPF to other technologies, I've decided to drop the name 'The Daily WPF' next month. So, the URL's 'dailywpf.com' and 'dailywpf.nl' will no longer be available from December 12. 2009.

This weblog will be available through blog.rubensteins.nl for now (until I find a new name), so update your bookmarks accordingly.

Thanks!
Ruben

Visual Studio 'Myth Busting Matrix'

Are you still being forced to use Visual Studio 2005? How about making a business case for VS 2008 or VS 2010 by showing your manager this Visual Studio Myth-busting Matrix that neatly sums up all the pros of upgrading to a modern version of our favourite IDE.

WPF-folks should be really looking forward to 2010 with it's swanky desingers and WPF startpage!