I haven’t done too much on the Sprint Planner Helper project during this week. A lot of Salvation Army activities have taken up my time.

But I have read the blog post (in the form of a PDF-book) from DDD Step By Step. I have read much of it before, but sometimes other words clear things up for you. This book did it for me.

OK – what to do tonight (Abbe is sound asleep and Elin has gone to work). I have most of the stuff from my first two user stories in place. But I need a way to easily move product backlog items up and down in the list. This will come in handy when the product backlog items are estimated.

So I’ll introduce some methods to move them in the product backlog list. And some arrows in the GUI for the list.

Let’s write...

The issue that I had with creating views for nested classes is solved with a new release of the ASP.NET MVC RC.

Thanks to some very fast response from Phil Haack, I’ve got to know about a new release of the framework. Here is the link to the RC II of the ASP.NET MVC.

Worked fine and as I said solved my problem.

When you’re learning something new, you’ll expect some progress and the occasional setback. If you are on your own, as I am in this project, that is even more likely to be the other way around.

My approach to learning this is very much like the way we played with the chemistry box when we were small – try something you believe will work and expect the whole thing to blow up, possibly with a stinging sensation in your eye…

So… I guess that you see where this is going. I have to redo something. Actually, it’s two things. And actually, I am not that worried; the whole idea of agile TDD, DDD, and all this is that it should be easy to change.

The first thing is not a biggie; my Entities have a Guid as ID right now. It’s mega-ugly when I am passing it...

OK – here is one of the nicest and probably best trombone players in the world showing off his amazing technique.

Follow this link to a short clip from SVT where a couple of musicians compete in playing the Flight of the Bumble Bee. In Swedish… The whole program can be found here.

Amazingly, Håkan plays the piece 20 beats faster than, for example, the violinist… And very clean.

Thanks for the lesson Håkan!

I am now almost ready with the first user story of my own backlog.

1. As a user, I can create a product that describes the product and the product owner so that the purpose of the product is known.

Each product has a product backlog that describes what is left to do.

Each product backlog item requires at least a Number (1.2.1), description, and initial priority.

Other properties are story points (how big is this compared to others) and a document with additional business rules.

The one thing that is left is to be able to create new backlog items.

My GUI for editing a product right now looks like this:

As I said before, I will not put too much effort into the design of the GUI, but I have noticed that the MVC-pattern opens up for GUI-design...

As I wrote earlier, I have been away from Stockholm for a few days. Me, Abbe, and my father-in-law went on a mini-vacation at Hyppeln in the Gothenburg archipelago.

The weather was wonderful, and we had some really nice days with a hint of summer-feeling…

[UPDATED] This is solved. See this.

I ran into this problem:

It appeared when I added an Edit-view for an inline view-data class. That is, I created a special class to hold the view data that the controller is acting upon, and that class is declared inside the controller.

When the Add view-dialog (which I love by the way) of the ASP.NET MVC closes with OK – this dialog appears.

I think it’s a bug in the RC-release, but I am not sure. I’ll send this to the ASP.NET MVC team and see what they have to say.

I am not sure that I will have the view data class as part of the other class since that violates the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – but if I do, I get this crash.

The more...

I don’t think I have ever been doing system development in a nicer place – I am right now in Hyppeln in the Gothenburg archipelago. The weather is wonderful, and we have actually been sitting out for coffee and even managed to do some barbecue…

OK – I am pressing on with the Edit controller action for the Product. I ran into a bug in the ASP.NET MVC framework, which is the first one I have seen – pretty good for a Release Candidate…

I think that I have missed some part of the TDD process by not being good at “testing my boundaries” (a Code Smell from Clean Code by Robert C. Martin). When I first read it, I didn’t fully understand it, but as I am beginning to grasp the TDD approach, I realized that for most cases this means writing tests for NULL...

My corps (or church) has redone their website. Actually, it’s me who has added all the content. The Salvation Army in Sweden is using a content management tool called P3 that I am not too pleased about, but now it’s done.

And I can add webmaster (or whatever it’s called nowadays) to my CV. At least for a while.

Now go check out Vasakåren online

Ok – today I’ll start by creating a factory for the Product class. I have some issues with the factory pattern and here is my reasoning: Another class is the creator and must have access to the NEW method of the class to create it. Since that forces at least a protected-level on the constructor, it means that I cannot be sure that clients use the factory and not the constructor.

If I place the factory method on the class I am creating, I can ensure this. But then I am violating the Single Responsibility Principle. What to do, what to do…

For now, in TDD/XP fashion, I’ll implement the simplest solution: a static Create method on the class I am creating. I don’t have several different Product types, so it’s the same factory for all products, possibly with overloads.

Flame...