Songs of the Extremos

My co-worker Shaun Jayaraj today showed me the Songs of the Extremos. This is funny stuff... Check this one out first:

Hey Dude (sing to the tune of - "Hey Jude" by the Beatles)

Hey dude
Your code smells bad
Go refactor and make it better
Remember
That tests are requirements
Then you can begin
To make it smell better

While talking funny about Agile here is another good one, The Agile Manifesto (Hip-Hop Remix).

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

translates into:

Peeps and tradin' rhymes ova' fake moves and bling-bling

Do you dig it?

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

A co-worker of mine Alex Pukinski sent me this blog entry a few days ago about a guide to hiring the right software developers for your company. I find it very interesting and in many cases agreeing to what it says. Having done a few in-office interviews for ThoughtWorks and looking back at them, I could probably use this guide a little more in making my choices...

nunit.core.dll and GAC

I came across a useful tip on using NUnit in purely XCOPY fashion. NUnit download comes with an installer. During its installation, it sneakily would GAC the nunit.core.dll for you. This may or may not be causing you problem if your development source tree also contains your NUnit assemblies. By that I mean your build scripts might be structured in a way that it does not rely on each of the machine to have NUnit installed before building, but it uses its own source-controlled, XCOPY'ed NUnit exe and co.

If your machine does not have NUnit installed, but you get it through your source control system, when you run the test assemblies through the NUnit exe, you might get a nasty error (TDA: actual error message) from NUnit saying it cannot find nunit.core.dll or something.

One of the solution (that my colleague and NUnit contributor) Mike Two suggests is that in your projects where you would use nunit.framework.dll, to also add a reference to the nunit.core.dll of your source tree. This guarantees that NUnit would be able to find it and load it into its AppDomain. This way you will never need to install NUnit and rely of the assembly being GAC'ed.

Lovely business words...

There are a few words in the business IT world I dislike. The beauty is that in whatever order and however you put these words together in a statement they will deliver the exact same message - a broad and meaningless statement. Here are the candidates:

business
enterprise
architecture
management
solution
infrastructure
model

eg. Yesterday I worked on the enterprise business architecture of the infrastructure solution of the project.
eg. I am the architect of the business solution infrastructure team, managing the project's business model.

Google Suggest with ASP.NET 2.0

This interesting blog post talks about how to do the Google Suggest way of communicating with the server without triggering a postback in ASP.NET 2.0. Pretty neat.

How to create build scripts for projects

Here is an article from Mike Roberts on how to set up the build scripts for .NET development project. I have had the pleasure to play with .NET 2.0 on my current project, and building the build scripts around .NET 2.0 and MSBuild I can definitely say it is not exactly fun.

For CruiseControl.NET to display compile errors from executing "msbuild project.sln", an XmlLogger has to be written and supplied to the command line. The code for the XmlLogger no longer works when I updated my Whidbey from Dec CTP to Feb CTP, which updated .NET Framework to build 50110, and therefore had to be re-written.

After that seems everything resumes normal... at least I am able to show compilation and nunit errors on my CCNet page.

Initialize()...

I am starting this blog today to write about the pain, pleasure, hate, and love of the various forms of technologies that I have encountered in my life. Working for ThoughtWorks has enabled me to grow maturely into a professional developer, which requires constant learning and experimenting the latest and greatest technologies. I truly enjoy working for this company...

And this is where my initialization routine begins... :-D