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!

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?

Today we installed CruiseControl to provide continuous builds for our Microsoft .NET 2.0 solution. Last week, while researching general information on Agile methodologies for a management presentation, I came across this Wikipedia entry on “Cowboy coding.”

And I was saddened, in a way, that today we we witnessing the death of a cowboy, but celebrating the birth of an opportunity for higher quality software development. And I’m excited that it should provide the spark required to push us into full-fledged TDD. Whoopie-ti-yi-yo, get along you little dogies.

Well I’m getting sold on Ruby on Rails—My background: I started with implementing Perl scripts, then PHP, then ASP, most recently ASP.NET. In some ways it seems a step back to go to UNIX-based web tech, in other ways it feels a step forward (Agile, Design Patterns, Ruby’s highly OO nature, Test-Driven Development, Ajax, etc.) Anyone else make the jump from ASP.NET to RoR who regretted it + moved back to ASP.NET? I haven’t read many posts out there from people who went to Rails (actually built something) who reverted back…