Friday 7 December 2007

iGoogle's todo list

I discovered iGoogle's todo list widget today. I was even thinking of writing my own but now I'm a happy little munchkin.

Sunday 2 December 2007

Domain Driven Design

So I went to another readify session the other day, this one about domain driven design. Some guy from Sydney was presenting it and he knew he was getting into holy war territory. There was the usual discussion, all of it good natured.

So what did I learn.

I think I learnt about the use of an aggregate. A class encapsulating a number of other classes/objects that has methods attached to it that may apply across more than one of the other objects. The example used was a transaction object, being used to deposit money into a bank account. Is the deposit method attached to the bank, the account or the customer. I suppose this has traditionally been the account that has transactions applied to it, but the suggested solution was to have a transaction aggregate object that has an account, a customer and a bank attached to it and put the deposit method on this object.

I'm not sure its a great example but I've seen similar things occur where a method can apply across two or more objects. usually it has led me to tack it onto one or the other object and pass a reference to the other required object. I always felt this was a little crap and now i have a logical solution and a reason why.

I learn a little more every day.

Friday 26 October 2007

Response to 5 easy ways to fail

Joel Spolsky wrote an article on 5 easy ways for a software project to fail and I think I disagree with Joels first point. I think in every team i have worked in there has been a star or two, a pile of middle ground developers and some duds. In my experience its more important to get rid of the duds than to get the 'superstars'.

While stars can be great, they are few and far between and they may not fit your corporate culture. Stars also have a habit of doing things their own way which no one else can follow and make themselves indispensable.

Back at HIH a now defunct Australian insurance company, i was working in Oracle Forms 2.0 with some extra additions that had been added by the local guru. They were great and made our developers lives easier, but then we moved to Forms 3.0 and voila these proprietary extensions didn't upgrade nicely. Which in the end created a headache and a lot of extra work in the upgrade process. My point being that the local guru, I don't know his name, did things which probably cost the company a lot of money in the end. I don't really know the politics of why the extensions got added.

I find a true superstar is not just a good coder but a good teacher as well. So people can follow what has gone before. I wonder if thats what Joel looks for when he chooses coders.

But i agree to avoid 'duds' just read any article from http://worsethanfailure.com/ to see the value of avoiding duds.

Monday 22 October 2007

SQL Server 2008 and AJAX session

Last Thursday i went to another of the Readify developer networks sessions.

This time Greg Low put on a show about SQL Server 2008 and all its new goodies
The highlights that come to mind are partial indexes, sparse columns and the huge number of other things they have added. In one of those amazingly useless Microsoft slides, Greg displayed all 100 or so things that have been added. Why can't Microsoft group these under headings? please.

T/SQL seems to have undergone a bit of a change too with table types being passed into procedures now and separate Date and Time classes now. All good stuff.

Damian Edwards came back for a repeat performance to follow up his Silverlight presentation of a few weeks ago. This time it was on AJAX and the basics. Time was short and Damian sped through the basics of AJAX, if you were already a web developer you may have felt it was a bit light on. For myself I'm just learning web stuff, but being a coder of a few years experience it was a good look at how Microsoft AJAX works in the new rich internet world.

Tuesday 9 October 2007

Monday 8 October 2007

I forgot to mention Databinding

In my last post about XAML I forgot to mention data binding. It appears to have improved a lot. From the demo i saw, you can now bind more than one object to the same data source and they both get updated "automagically" when the data changes.

This really kicks arse IMHO. Its like you get a Model View pattern now without having to implement the Observer pattern.

Damian Edwards who did the presentation had used it to make a demo game of Space Invaders using a timer and data binding. Very cool.

Saturday 6 October 2007

Readify .Net Session

Last thursday i went to a free session hosted by Readify at Cliftons on collins st. It was about WPF and Silverlight. It was part of the Readify Developer Networks sessions. If all of the presentations are to be of this standard then i highly recommend them.


I came away with some new things out of the silverlight session
- Silverlight has isolated storage on the client side
- Javascript can be called and can get called from managed code

and a few things from the WPF
- XAML is pretty amazing and I can imagine will become amazingly hard to read very quickly.
- XAML forms have a practical limit of 5000 items in their control tree
- Windows Forms can be hosted from XAML and vice versa

And most imprtantly i think i got inspired a little on the way.

Monday 1 October 2007

This blog to become computer related only.

I've been chatting to my girlfriend, susheila, and we've come to a decision to make this blog basically about computers and technology only.

Ill move any comments i make on politics and sport to other blogs.

Wednesday 26 September 2007

A First Post

Welcome to my blog.

I plan to chat about the things that interest me, this includes in no particular order

  • Software
  • Computer Science
  • Politics, History, Archaeology
  • Sports
and anything else that takes my fancy.

I may convert this into 3 or 4 different blogs based on these subjects in the future.