July 13, 2006
Vadim Gaidukevich wrote a great Agile PM system TargetProcess which we use (off-and-on) to track our .NET project work. (To be truthful, lately we’ve reverted to a paper notecard system as our team shrunk.)
So Vadim posts to his blog today a lamentation on how high the bar is to develop software compared to the “good old days.”
I agree with him 100%, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a fan of Ruby on Rails. It’s a world apart from C# in .NET, and it’s rough to get proficient in (for all the reasons Vadim mentions, so many areas learn) but it is very elegant, and just about everything you do is in Ruby.
Now if only I could find the time to make the leap from Rails rookie!
July 12, 2006
An interesting MSDN article by Jean-Paul Boodhoo discussing a way to test closer to the front-edge of a .NET web app. It’s interesting to see how TDD is evolving in the .NET world.
There does seem to be a lot of progress towards an opensource/TDD paradigm in .NET, though it’s still not a very cohesive end-to-end system. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft didn’t have the vision to build all this agile/tdd stuff into Visual Studio.
But maybe they did? I wonder if Team System has a lot of great stuff that I’ve just not been exposed to – when it came out with an outrageous $5.5-$11k per developer price tag, I convinced myself not to even take a glance at it or download a demo.
For anyone actively using Team System, how does it’s features stack up to the open-source lineup (NAnt, NUnit, CruiseControl, NCover, NDoc, FxCop, Simian) that it is competing with?
July 07, 2006
Looks like the PHP faction of the Web 2.0 crowd is getting a little uppity at the success 37 Signals has achieved, specifically their Basecamp product, heralding ActiveCollab as a candidate to kill their monopoly on PM software. Pure sillyness, and a clear case of RoRenvy.
For the record, 37S didn’t pay me to say this – but I do owe them continuous thanks for breathing new life into what felt like a stale lineup of webappdev tools.
