Rubens Blog

Microsoft Developer Catalog

Ruben Steins — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:47:32 GMT

If you need to get a grip of a particular Microsoft technology and have no idea how to start learning in a structured way, you should check out the Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps. It provides a detailed overview of all relevant topics related to the different key technologies and provides direct links to all tutorial material about it (be it videos, hands-on labs or what not).

The Microsoft Developer Catalog is a map of resources for developers. It's a catalog of pointers to useful code samples, how tos, videos, etc. for the Microsoft application platform. We're using this catalog as a way to model, prototype, and test ways to find, organize, and share developer guidance in a meaningful way. As we refine the organizational patterns of the content we can build commonality between the technologies. This commonality is what we are referring to as a "Simple IA" where IA is information architecture. Think of it as a simple way to look at groups of content.

Environment.Newline

Ruben Steins — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:07:09 GMT

Doing some Java for a project now. I sure miss Environment.Newline...


public static String newline = System.getProperty("line.separator");

Introduction to Functional Programming in 13 Episodes

Ruben Steins — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:24:44 GMT

Came across an amazingly interesting series of lectures on Functional Programming on Channel 9. In the 13 part C9 Lectures: Functional Programming Fundamentals, Dr. Erik Meijer, one of the most colorful Microsoft employees, takes us into the fascinating and somewhat alien world of Haskell.

I will discuss my thoughts on each episode as I follow along. Doing some Haskell gets me well outside of my comfort zone, so I might even have something worth reading to say about if :)

The first episode takes a short history tour through the origins of functional programming, talking about languages like ML, Miranda, Cecil and other obscurities. He kind of lost me when he rushed through SKI Combinators, but the gallery of languages and what influence on modern languages they had was pretty cool.

My eyes glazed over a little when I saw the Quicksort in Haskell, the same way they did at about page 6 of Knuth... I hope things will make more sense after seeing the next lecture... That, or I really should stick to LOB applications :P

Great video tutorial on TDD in C# by Brett L. Schuchert

Ruben Steins — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:33:55 GMT

In this excellent four-partShunting Yard Algorithm in C#, TDD Style videos, Brett goes through quite a few red-green-refactor cycles in implementing this alogrithm to transform an expression into the Polsih notation.

If you've never done TDD, this is great demo of its value. If you've done TDD, it might be less interesting but informative nonetheless!

Luca Bolognese - Talking about F# and Cappucino

Ruben Steins — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 07:24:30 GMT

Because I'm going through a MS Partner Academy training called 'Developing .NET Applications With Visual Studio 2010 for Technical Pre-Sales Professionals', I come across a lot of stuff I hadn't really looked at before.

One of those is F#. I made a blogpost about it working with WPF quite a while back, but never really dove into it.

So, yesterday I saw this amazing webcast by Luca Bolognese called An Introduction to Microsoft F#. Even though Luca has 'an outrageuous accent' the talk is quite informative and pretty funny. It also gives a nice overview of F# and how/why it's used.

How does a blind programmer work?

Ruben Steins — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:55:32 GMT

This is another old video I can across while sifting through the Channel 9 Video Archives.

How do you program when you're blind? This video show how Kenneth Spector, who was a 2004 Microsoft intern does his work, using a braillemonitor and a screenreader. Pretty cool!

Software Engineering versus Computer Science

Ruben Steins — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:11:30 GMT

Shortly after listening to the Ivar Jacobson podcast, my playlist presented me with episode 149 of the SE-Radio podcast: "Difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science with Chuck Connell".

The talk is focussed on how engineering is a much softer discipline than computer science since people are involved. This is way real-world projects are inherently less predictable than typical CS problems, which are usually of a more algorithmical nature.

Chuck Connell actually comes to the same conclusion as Jacobson, which is that we need to form a body of best practices that can become a baseline for the craft that is software engineering. This is the only way we -as a discipline- can improve. Learn from our mistakes, document them and avoid them, just as people building bridges have done throughout the ages!

Visual Studio 2010 RC - Empty ASP.NET MVC 2 Template error

Ruben Steins — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:46:49 GMT

There's a bug in the empty ASP.NET MVC 2 template in Visual Studio 2010 RC that I came across today when I tried to run a samplesite I had constructed in VS2010 Beta 2. Apparently the correct assemblies are not added to the web.config, so when trying to run any code that has to do with routing (such as ActionLinks).

The supplied workaround is to add the following to you web.config, in the section:

This workaround is explained on the Microsoft Connect Bug Report.

Essential UP - The Kernel of Software Engineering

Ruben Steins — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:43:32 GMT

I just finished listening to Ivar Jacobson talking about Essential UP on Dot Net Rocks and I must say: it sounds good.

Less heavywweight and focussing on best practices sounds like a great idea. What's more, they're not trying to sell you anything, as IBM is doing with RUP. There is tooling, but it's free!

On the podcast, Ivar talks about creating a universal vocabulary in software engineering, one that trancends the 'fashionable methodology of the time'. He calls it a 'kernel of things we do everytime in software development'. The need for this stems from the fact that in our industry we have the tendency to throw away everything an 'outdated methodology' has to offer and start anew. The problem is that we don't throw away only the bad aspects, but also the good ones. So we keep reinventing the wheel, over and over again.

If we had a set of sensible defaults, a 'generic process' we could teach students, we would at least all be on the same page right from the start. Mind you, that the intention is not to dictate a certain practice, but to simply identify those aspects that are part of each and every project.

Take 'requirements' for exameple. Without specifying how these look like and what they consist of, it's save to say that every software developemnt project has requirements. You can't build softare without requirements. Depending on which practices you follow, these requirements might contain use-cases in a requirements-document or userstories on 4x6 cards, or it might be a wishlist of features residing in the head of the developer. Regardless of which it is, it would be silly to deny there are requirements available. Now, the 'kernel' would contains facts just like these I imagine.

So, next up is reading what the people at IvarJacobson.com have to say about this kernel and find out what it's all about!

Windows it NOT the most important OS

Ruben Steins — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:10:50 GMT

Today I felt like going back to the early days of Channel 9 at MSDN and found a really insightfull video featuring Bill Hill in which he comes to a very important conclusion: we all use the same OS in the end: Homo Sapiens 1.0.

The movie is pretty ancient by web standards (2004) but the message is still valid. So go and watch the video, it will take only 3.5 minutes of your time. It will make you laugh AND teach you something!