Andy Douglas

How to write better code / Intro to Agile

Andrew Douglas — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:24:24 +0000

The best programmers that I know are knowledgeable about agile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) and practice one or more aspects of agile programming. On Wednesday, 2/17/2010, I gave a short presentation to the Sogeti Cincinnati Microsoft Practice to provide an introduction to agile concepts, and to generally talk about how programmers can improve their programming skills. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in agile methodologies. I have become aware of agile techniques primarily through great presentations by smart people who belong to the Cincinnati .Net User Group or who have presented there. It seems to me that many people are unaware of the benefits that agile can bring to their skill set. The more I learn about agile, the more I become passionate about the methodologies, techniques and tools, and the more frustrated I become with anti-patterns and being anti-agile. Here’s to the programmers with genuine interest in improving their skills and thanks to those who have shared their knowledge with me and made me aware of agile.

Slides from the presentation

Charting in Silverlight with Visifire Charts

Andrew Douglas — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:53:11 +0000

Currently (12-8-09) there are only a couple free options for creating custom charting solutions in Silverlight / WCF. One is to utilize Microsoft’s new Silverlight 3 Toolkit (http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight) and the other is Visifire Charts (http://www.visifire.com/). At this point in time, it seems to me that Visifire is clearly a more sophisticated solution in terms of look-and-feel as well as offering more chart types from which to choose. Visifire is free under the terms of the Gnu Public License, but requires a commercial license if the GPL doesn’t apply.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, 12-9-09, I will deliver a mini-presentation to the Sogeti Microsoft Practice to demonstrate Visifire Charts. I will explain the options of how to implement it, and show off my simple “VisifireWrapper” application. VisifireWrapper (see the .zip attachment to this post) seeks to ease implementing Visifire Charts in cases where either static XML or dynamically-created Visifire-specific XML is too cumbersome or otherwise undesirable. Note that in order to make use of VisifireWrapper, you’ll need to have Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 3 (and possibly other downloads available for free from Microsoft).

Click here for slides from the presentation and the VisifireWrapper application.

System Architecture (Basics) - Resources

Andrew Douglas — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:23:23 +0000

On Wednesday, September 9th, Dave Wanner and I delivered to the Cincinnati office a Sogeti Academy course called System Architecture (Basics). The links below provide references to material presented as well as resources for further learning of the subject matter.

Slides and References

Slides from Presentation
(Reference) Security Architecture
(Reference) Security Architecture
“An Introduction to Software Architecture”, David Garlan and Mary Shaw, January 1994
“Software Architecture: Central Concerns, Key Decisions”, By Malan, Ruth and Dana Bredemeyer
“A Software Architecture Primer”, By H. J. Reekie, R. J. McAdam (see courseware site)
“Enterprise, Business and IT Architecture and the Integrated Architecture Framework” (available to Sogeti employees on Connex by searching on IAF -> Locate “Architecture and IAF Booklet.pdf” by Derrick Tussey (3/3/2009))

Instructional/Tutorial

(.Net) Choosing a UI Pattern (MVC, MVP, and ASP.Net MVC)
(.Net) Model View Presenter with ASP.Net
(.Net) ASP.Net MVC Videos
(.Net) Intro to test-driven development with NUnit and C#
(.Net) Enabling Test Driven Development with Dependency Injection and Mock Objects (with source code)
(.Net) Video tutorial: test-driven development with NUnit, Rhino Mocks in ASP.Net C# with MVP UI pattern
(Java) Slides on the benefits of test-driven-development
(Java) Video: Test-driven development with Java and JUnit
(Java) Video: Test-driven development with Java and JNunit

Real Live Source Code (Projects that illustrate the concepts from the class)

(.Net) NerdDinner (ASP.Net MVC in C# with MS Test)
(.Net) Creating Applications using the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern (slides and source code [WPF in C#])
(.Net) Model-View-Presenter in ASP.Net (WebForms, not ASP.Net MVC) with C# and Rhino Mocks
(.Net) Model-View-Presenter in C# Windows Forms with NUnit and Moq: (link will be forthcoming):

Unit Testing Frameworks

(.Net) NUnit: http://www.nunit.org
(.Net) MbUnit: http://www.mbunit.com/
(.Net) Moq: http://code.google.com/p/moq/
(.Net) Rhino Mocks: http://ayende.com/projects/rhino-mocks.aspx
(Java) JUnit: http://junit.sourceforge.net/
(Java) JMock: http://www.jmock.org/