Under the hood and working with .Net, TDD, Software Design, and Agile Stuff
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -- Ferris Bueller
The art of software development moves fast. We're still a young discipline compared to engineering and we're still learning new and better ways to create software. Last year I sharpened my saw by adding mock objects, dependency injection/inversion of control, WinForms, and "BuildMaster" skills to my toolset. I spent a ludicrous amount of time on StructureMap though and let other new skill development and learning slide.
Here's the things I want to learn more about this year:
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I'm still a little dubious about the dynamic typing, but too many people are effusive about Ruby's potential to ignore this very much longer. If nothing else, Ruby should grow into the language of choice for scripts and what I call "NAnt-ey" tasks.
- Ajax. I did a lot of IE specific Ajax development several years ago (before Google named the concept) and had quite a bit of success with it (a mission critical supply chain application and a dispute resolution workflow system, both still running). At the time it wasn't really a good platform choice because of the lack of developer familiarity with the techniques (plus IE5 had *huge* memory leaks with heavy DHTML manipulation). Because of the new hype from the Google apps and cross browser testing tools for DHTML like JSUnit and Selenium, Ajax development is looking like a viable choice now. I'll blog more on my experiences with this now that it is actually relevant.
- Acceptance testing tools like NFit and Selenium. I love the concepts, but I think the NFit implementation could be better.
- Finally finish reading Domain Driven Development
- NHibernate. When .NET first came out in beta in 2002, I had dreams of creating the ultimate O/R mapper for the platform (use emitting for the mapping and use parameterized sql for better performance than NHibernate's purely reflective approach). I even wrote an article for C# Today on using reflection for O/R mapping. Alas, I didn't have the skillset then and I don't have the ambition today. Especially when NHibernate is there with an active development community and poised to become the de facto standard for O/R mapping in .NET. I know they have their proponents, but I don't count persistence generation tools like Neo, LLBGen, or Codus as O/R mapping.
- Aspect Oriented Programming. I'd love to add some runtime AOP support to StructureMap.
My StructureMap tool actually started its life as an O/R and data access layer tool. What's actually there on SourceForge is just a refinement of what was supposed to be the configuration framework for the rest.
About Jeremy D. Miller
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy previously worked as a systems architect building mission critical supply chain software for a Fortune 100 company and learned agile development practices as a .Net consultant at ThoughtWorks, one of the pioneers of agile development. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap (http://structuremap.sourceforge.net) tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller (http://storyteller.tigris.org) tool for supercharged FIT testing in .Net. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog "The Shade Tree Developer" at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#.
