Accomplishing more by doing less

This day started with Marc Lesser giving a keynote on “Accomplishing more by doing less”. This was a short overview of the day that I attended on Monday, so it was some of the same, but also gave a crisper understanding of the subject. It was great to get a repetition for me.

Great quote of the day; Find “the One who are not busy”. In yourself, or God or whatever you read into it. I know what I do…

Scrum – why it’s so hard to implement

Jens Ödegaard gave this talk and it was one of those: “you’re not gonna get any silver bullets”, but rather a run through the challenges you face implementing Scrum. It was quite nice see that I wasn’t alone in my experiences. Here is some quotes that stuck:

• We want organizations that dare...

Now it’s NHibernate with Stephen Bohlen, who is aiming to cramming in all (kinda…) of the screencast on www.summerofnhibernate.com in 4 hours.

I think I’ll just sit back and try to learn this, because this guy is probably paid by the word :)

OK – closing in on the end. I really enjoyed this presentation but it would have benefitted from being longer, a whole day. It felt a bit rushed and we didn’t get as far as I would have reached. Although the material covered was great and well presented. And now I always have the www.summerofnhibernate.com to run back to.

I learned something about TDD and unit tests. Always ask:

“What can we safely assert?”

And the answer should be:

“Only the values I’ve set in the test code”

This is especially useful doing “unit tests” against the...

Now we’re getting into the “real stuff” or rather IT-related stuff.

I am now attending a session with Scott Allen, who is a great guy by the way, on ASP.NET MVC. As readers of this blog know I love this framework already since it got me back on understanding web development again.

OK - since Scott is dropping god nuggets as he speak, I thought that I put it here as we go, in no particular order;

• When you create the “URL template” for routing you can specify anything you want. For example {controller}/{action}/{category}/{locale} would fill the category and local with anything passed to the URL or null if not set.
• Learn and use MVC Contrib
• Set the projectfile-setting MvcBuildViews to get compilation errors for errors in the views. This slows builds down so don’t use it when not needed.
• Test your routing with...

I am at my first conference since 2000. My good times flies, then it was .NET launch and I was very envious of the people getting to try it out since I was stuck in a never ending VB6 Com+ assignment. Well, here we are - 2009 and ÖreDev.

The first day for me was spent with a single session that took the whole day. I didn’t know to much about it and simple went to it since the title was so alluring - Accomplishing more by doing less, with Marc Lesser (taken name?). Who can miss out on such a offering.

Well, as expected I guess, the content wasn’t so much on thing to do, that would only have added to the burden of things to do. But rather it was about doing less of some thing, namely:

• Fear - here we talked a lot...

I stumbled over a great resource for agile coaches, http://www.agilecoach.net. Don’t let the humble, yet informative, first page put you off – there some really great and fun stuff inside. For example:

• Starting with a new Team
• Coach tools
• The Coach log – how to do agile coaching

I know I will be spending a lot of time here.

I have been looking into how to solve a Source Control problem. The problem is that is quite a lot of work to get it up and running in a very short time span.

OK – got an excellent tip (thanks Magnus!) on the Unfuddle-hosting service, that not only hosts your source control but also have lot of other services, such as a dashboard, bug tracking, calendar etc. And for very small teams its free! And for small team, nearly free; $9/month!

That’s all good – but I need a seamless and slick integration into Visual Studio 2008 to go with my repository. Enter AnkhSVN (wasn’t that the name Prince used for himself for a while?). OK – I’m using the tool not saying it out loud… I hope. It looks very promising and is used...

OK – I am a developer. I use all these crazy keys and combination that I suspect no normal person would ever think about. But for us (developers) a combination like CTRL+R,T (run all test in Visual Studio Solution) and CTRL+SHIFT+F11 (Step out of function while debugging) makes perfect sense. It’s no biggie.

I suspect that the Parallels Desktop, which I love by the way, didn’t think primarily of developers when they thought about the keyboard integration. But that’s ok – I’ll just learn some new funky combinations and away we go.

So if you want to press any of the F9-F12 keys in a Parallels Desktop Windows image running on a Mac – you’ll get quite surprised. The Mac command takes upper hand (that goes for all F-keys actually). And here is how to get by that.

Kind of – that didn’t work on my...

I’ve just learned about this and don’t want to loose the thought and links surrounding it.

The first encounter I had with DDD was when Jimmy Nilsson did a presentation at Elevate. One of the things he said did a profound impression on me, especially the part when he talked about the database being a consequence of my domain model, not the other way around.

OK – this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if it also was that way with the GUI? The GUI being a consequence or reflecting what my domain model captures?

Here is, to my very narrow knowledge, the solution – DDD with Naked Objects. Naked objects is an architectural pattern that adds a principle of the GUI being automatically generated (or generated on the fly I presume) from the model.

OK –...

Found a great presentation on the excellent S#arp Architecture framework. The presentation is given by Billy McCafferty who is the father of the framework.

It’s so good – you just want to start to code with it. It’s a bit “rough” but I suspect that we will see some major improvements in the “developer experience” in the near future.

Also – tomorrow Håkan Alexander will present the framework at Elevate. It will be great to see how the framework will be received among the Avegean. I would cast my vote on big success…

OK – this might well be one of the shortest thing I’ve written but it’s sooo annoying.

If you want to do DELETE (hitting the Delete-key) in the Windows OS running in Parallels, go [fn]-[<-] (function and backspace) on your Mac Keyboard.

Ahhh – so nice to get that out of my system.