Half assedness in our software development world, LINQ, lots of tools and more! Read on!
We continue to meet interested and dedicated (and interesting) technology experts wherever we take our Open Space Tour. Yesterday in Linköping was no exception to this rule. They guys at the event were a little bit hard to get to begin talking but underneath that surface there lurked a whole lot of knowledge and experience just aching to get out and to be shared. The common feeling was that it was really nice to have a setting to talk to those with a similar mind (we are all nerds) about things that interest us and make sense in our world. There is no .NET User Group in Linköping but if we are lucky this is soon a thing of the passed. It would be real cool if the guys there start up a forum where we can ventilate our techie interests and get to know the community of people who live and work with .NET technology in and around Linköping. Let's hope this was a start of something new!
What did we talk about?
We started out with two groups for one first iteration where one talked about unit testing (and tools) and the other talked about XNA in business applications. The latter was a very suitable topic not suggested by but participated by Mattias Eriksson, a great colleague, will speak about at Øredev: Mattias Eriksson, XNA
We also spent quite a bit of time talking about C# and LINQ. Most of the guys attending were either not mainly .NET developers or they were in projects that had not yet migrated to .NET Framework 3.5 (download). On that note; two of the coolest places to go if you want to learn more about LINQ are: 101 LINQ samples and LINQ Pad. I actually use the Pad frequently since it is small and convenient.
Then we talked about the suite of tools you need to know maintain or integrate if you don't have the money to buy any of the Visual Studio Team Suite IDE editions with Team Foundation Server. Each of the specialized applications solving just one piece of the puzzle (be it nUnit, Cruise, Subversion or any of the very many other options out there) survive only on the premise of being a really good and useful applicaiton. However you are left to handling, upgrading, maintaining and integrating all of the pieces yourself. Microsoft have shipped Team Foundation Server as a way to integrate all of the things many of us associate with modern a development process and it's tooling: Continous Integration (Fowler on CI), Source Control (or Revision Control), Unit Testing (nUnit, mbUnit, Visual Studio Team System Unit Testing Framework), Mocking (nMock, Rhino Mocks, Moq etc.), Agile Software Development Process support (Mingle and Scrum for Team System to just mention to of the possibilities) and more. Did I forget something? Most of us would agree that some features of many of these different products are lacking at present from TFS but most of us would continue to agree that it is very laborious and cumbersome to handle this ourselves. The silver lining of the development process continues to evade capture!
Do we have to settle for either fully integrated or really really good applications with all the features we require?
And why is it that we have to wait for an open source initiative that works half assed before we can get ReSharper to run Microsofts test framework (Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting) or the Microsoft Visual Studio test framework to run nUnit?
Can't we all just get along (and sing Kum Ba Yah)? Where is Utopia? I want to outsource to there! 
(I just blogged this from the train! How cool is that?)
The other events:
Cheers,
/Magnus
posted @ Tuesday, September 02, 2008 9:26 AM