DesignAndCode software development thoughts..

In the DotNetRocks podcast with Aslan Kahn, I figured I should go look at the mans blog. On there I found mention of a tool, that I had not heard of - Cucumber. The next week, I attended a meeting of the Atlanta ALT.NET group and the presentation on FluentNhibernate - also showed an example of Cucubmer. A very english looking business description to write out test cases.

Aslan Kahn gave a presentation at the SPIN meeting in South Africa and he mentioned that the Cucubmer site starting get a whole lot of activity.

I went out and found where you can find Cucumber.

There is a book to be released this year "The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends" - from Pragmatic Press (The Pragamatic Programmer is something you should read if you have not).

Cucumber has a Ruby background to it - check out the website to get more info.

I did find an article about Cucumber with a focus on how it can be used in the development process.

Today - I was trying to "catchup on" (and cleanup) my downloaded podcasts. I heard Show 81 with Shawn Creamer from Microsoft on Performance Monitoring and it spoke about a Technet article by Steven Choy also from Microsoft. They referred to it as a PDF but the link is the Technet article.

Shane Creamer stressed that people need to learn how to use the performance monitoring tools, and the article identifies the 25 most important counters that developers and IT staff need to be aware of.  This information is something that I will want to come back to and feel that others would find of great interest also. Shane teaches a course on Performance monitoring to pinpoint issues.

The RunAsRadio did post a video on the site that goes with the Show 81 - but did not put sound that came from the show which dramatically lessened its value.

RunAsRadio also had an interview (Show 77)with Steven Choy who speaks about performance monitoring and virtualization. Both shows were good. and I would recommend given them a listen.

I attended the AtlantaCodeCamp this last weekend, which looked like there were at least 300 attendees.

It was at the Gwinnett College campus -which was a GREAT venue. Great team of organizers from multiple DotNet Groups in the area, and everyone was out there supporting it.

There was plenty of SWAG too. Lots of books, software, hardware, and clothing. Then there were special training courses given away, and finally there were two one year licenses for MSDN Team Foundation Server that were the "grand prizes".

I won, one of those MSDN licences.

My appreciation to all the sponsors, organizers, and people whom attended and contributed to this event.

Even without the great license prize, I strengthened old connections, and made new ones, and learned things that I might not have been exposed to otherwise.

Developer community participation helps all invovled, to grow their knowledge, skills, and connections to other developers.

remember to look into

www.devlink.net in Nashville

and www.codestock.org in Knoxville

They are coming up again this year and I am hoping to attend again.

I saw an article about Qooxdoo (pronounced like "cooks-doo") on the Ajaxian website this evening. A JavaScript Framework that has apparently been in develoment since 2005.

The Qooxdoo framework is open source, and has some RPC hooks for Java,Perl, and PHP from what I saw. I am posting this as a note to go look into that a bit more later on.  They make a point that this is not a Javascript Library - like jQuery or prototype it is a Framework.

There is a PlayGround that the article mentioned - so you can play around with the Javascript API.

More interesting software to look at.

I found a link tonight that led to a Codeplex project http://www.codeplex.com/cracknetproject.

From the Codeplex site

Crack.NET is a runtime debugging and scripting tool that gives you access to the internals of a WPF or Windows Forms application running on your computer. If you love Snoop and Mole for Visual Studio, you’ll love Crack.NET, too. Crack.NET allows you to “walk” the managed heap of another .NET application, and inspect all values on all objects/types.

This looks like a good tool in becoming familiar with what is going on in WPF and Winform apps.

Last week, I watched the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2008 ( PDC2008 )- key note by Ray Ozzie the technical visionary for Microsoft, as he announced Azure - Microsofts entry into "Cloud Computing". Essentially an infrastructure of services on the internet. In that discussion he mentioned Amazon's S3 inititiave  - which Ozzie indicated was something that Microsoft looked at for their inspiration. If you go to the Amazon site, you see a list of charges - which I imagine could add up over time, but it really depends on how much it gets used.

I suspect that Microsoft will have to be competitive with Azure and its offerings to "be competitive".

One post I saw indicated that Microsoft was not committing to a date on when it would go "commercial" with Azure - which did seem as odd to me too.  Almost like they are not sure that this is where things will go - the post I read said that he had asked for one large business that was looking at using Azure for its business - and never got one name.

I suspect that might change by the end of next year, but it is a change in how computing is done, and how the industry is changing. Where the OS is on the internet and you only need a browser instead of a computer - is one thought pattern on that.

I think people like having control of their own computer - so it is not going to control everything.