Recent PoC and experimentations

• Downloaded the CruiseControl.net's Source code. 
• Retargeted cctray to .net 4, added the ability for it to work against tfs2010.
• Installed WP7 SDK
• after the pain  I went through to allow 4 gigs of free space on my system drive (SSD), it said it only needed 515Mb to install. Yet the installer would not even attempt to install without the huge extra free space.
• Searched for options to actually load a simple one-button app on my phone to try it out.
• Found NOTHING that allows you to do that for free.
• Installed Windows7 Sdk
• Read comments from Jon Skeet indicating Eclipse is far ahead of Visual Studio and so:

• Searched for options to write C# in Eclipse
• Installed Eclipse, PyDev, and Jython
• Can't get eclipse to let me using the jython interpreter so far.
• Did a java homework assignment from a local college java class in eclipse
• Implemented Mark Seemann's Composition root ideas in a web forms user control.
• Took a small cursory look through a Knockout.js IDE webapp
• Added myself and some of my personal projects to ohloh
• Joined a minecraft protocol project  http://libminecraft.codeplex.com/

Stand up Ninject on MVC against EF4

Here's the bindings I used to get it done

    /// <summary>
    
    /// Load your modules or register your 
services here
    
    /// </summary>
    
    /// <param name="kernel">The kernel.</param>
    
private static void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel)
    {
      
  kernel.Bind<string>()
        .ToMethod(f =>
#pragma warning disable 0618 //disable obsolete warning as this is the ONLY place this method should be used in the application
          
  ProjectDb.Adapter.EfExtensions.CreateConnectionString(
#pragma warning restore 0618
          "data source=databaseSource;initial 
catalog=YourDbName;integrated 
security=True;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework"))
      .Named("efString");

      
kernel.Bind(typeof(Project.Shared.Behaviors.IRepository<>))
  .To<ProjectDb.Adapter.DEVEntities>()
  .InThreadScope()
        
  .WithConstructorArgument("connectionString",kernel.Get<string>("efString"));


    }

Best Software Writing - More than money

I sent these excerpts to all on my team and many more developers and developer managers at work.

The whole chapter is VERY insightful on understanding what drives top developer talent.

 

Edisons

…That's not a new idea. Fred Brooks wrote about it in 1974,^[] and the study he quoted was published in 1968. But I think he underestimated the variation between programmers. He wrote about productivity in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth of the time. But what if the problem isn't given? In programming, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. Imagination is hard to measure, but in practice it dominates the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code.Productivity varies in any field, but there are few in which it varies so much. The variation between programmers is so great that it becomes a difference in kind. I don't think this is something intrinsic to programming, though. In every field, technology magnifies differences in productivity. I think what's happening in programming is just that we have a lot of technological leverage. But in every field the lever is getting longer, so the variation we see is something that more and more fields will see as time goes on. And the success of companies, and countries, will depend increasingly on how they deal with it.If variation in productivity increases with technology, then the contribution of the most productive individuals will not only be disproportionately large but will actually grow with time. When you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something (whether Viking raids, or central planning) drags their productivity down to the average.If we want to get the most out of them, we need to understand these especially productive people. What motivates them? What do they need to do their jobs? How do you recognize them? How do you get them to come and work for you? And then of course there's the question, how do you become one?

 

More than Money

I know a handful of super-hackers, so I sat down and thought about what they have in common. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program. Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.Economically, this is a fact of the greatest importance, because it means you don't have to pay great hackers anything like what they're worth. A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much. As I'll explain later, this is partly because great hackers don't know how good they are. But it's also because money is not the main thing they want.What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

…

 

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

 

Excerpts taken from The Best Software writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spoelsky Page 97-106 – (a collection of writing’s Joel gathered from other writers) 

Composition Root

I'm reading Dependency Injection in .Net by Mark Seemann

In response to http://blog.ploeh.dk/2011/07/28/CompositionRoot.aspx

I'm only up to reading mid-way through your chapter on doing it right (and jumped to the asp.net webforms composition root after reading this blog post), but here is more of my reasoning.

The catch comes when you look at the behavior, and you realize that there is hardly any behavior on these objects, making them little more than bags of getters and setters. Indeed often these models come with design rules that say that you are not to put any domain logic in the the domain objects. AnemicDomain Models - Martin Fowler

It becomes a 'real' domain model when it contains all (or most) of the behaviour that makes up the business domain (note I'm emphasising business logic, not UI or other orthogonal concerns). Anemic Domain Models - Stack overflow

I don't feel that this is headed into an Anemic domain model as the domain model assembly would contain all behaviors specific to the domain.

  Designs that share very little state or, even better, have no state at all tend to be less prone to hard to analyze bugs and easier to repurpose when requirements change. Blog article - makes sense but i could be missing multiple boats here.

The domain would have zero state, and would depend on interfaces not DTOs. This would make test-ability and analysis simple.

 Motivation for DTOs in the interfaces layer: presentation and persistence could all share the DTOs rather than having them duplicated in either place.
Barring that perceived gain, then the shared layer across all would just be interfaces.

 The UI could depend on interfaces only, but the same assembly would contain DTOs that the presentation layer and any persistence could share without having to be duplicated/rewritten. So the domain is completely persistence and presentation ignorant.

Routing except webforms requests

I have a legacy webforms (.aspx) project that I'm sliding routing and MVC3 into. I needed a route that would not prevent the default page from being handled by IIS, but would allow all other controller style routing.  How do you make a regex that only fails uri's that have .aspx or .axd in them?

Then I thought well I still don't want anything that doesn't look like an mvc route (things that end in .foo or .fooo)  Sounds like a crazy negative regex.
Here's the regular expression:

^(.(?!\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{3,}))*$


Match anything that doesn't look like a file extension 


And here's the routeAdd in global.asax

static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
  {

     routes.MapRoute("mvc", "{controller}/{action}/{id}",defaults: new{action="index",id=""}, constraints:new{controller=@"^(.(?!\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{3,}))*$"});

  }