Codesqueez

I've started reading about Agile Methodologies. I thought I knew all the stories. Man was I wrong. There is a lot more to Agile than what I thought.

Right now I'm struggling with Velocity and assigning points to user stories. Well I'll find the solution maybe when it's not so late :D.

For the moment I found this really cool post here. If you're interested in increasing your team's speed I urge you to have a look at Agile and learn it.

As usual I'm learning by myself, university keeps disappointing me in this. For our collective project they asked us to use Agile and TDD. LOL - that was a nice. I ended up writing most of it myself. I won't do that never again! ( I hope :-s ).

As usual I continue to babble and I like having a conclusion to what I'm pointing towards ( just in case I haven't already ). So give codesqueez a try for some examples of applied agile.

Why do developers choose Microsoft® ?

Note: This is a post I will probably update once I get more ideas or thoughts I want to share. :)

It should come as no surprise that the majority of today's developer are mostly focused on technologies built on and for the frameworks offered by Microsoft®.

The topic of this post is why is that?

Basically we have an always evolving Market, that is always asking for better tooling and better software. Microsoft® is the biggest supplier of such software having their own operating system, as well as great development tools like Visual Studio and a platform like .Net that makes it easier, faster and funnier to develop programs.

Microsoft also offers Visual Studio® as Express Edition. What this means is that you have people curios about developing on the platforms offered by Microsoft® some nice tools with obvious limitations that let's them test the products and even develop programs.

Whenever you ask someone that is "old" in the industry ( by old I mean he has 10 years+ experience in the field ) they will always choose Microsoft® technologies because life is nicer when it's safer, and with Microsoft® you have the assurance that they will continue to improve the technologies that you are offered.

Most of the times they offer limitations to the products you are offered because there will always be those who will fill the loop holes for personal gain.

It's basically a symbiotic relationship, we pay Microsoft for the software we use. Others pay us to use and extend these products. To be honest I haven't really found any other software organization that gives so many extension points.

There are obviously those who hate that Microsoft® makes so much money and forces you to use their system and that it doesn't integrate nicely with stuff that was not built for their framework. I sometimes wish that I could write once deploy everywhere.

Well There is Mono. And my hopes are that they will do what Microsoft didn't directly do. Novel is the firm that's behind Mono, although it's an open-source project funding comes from the private domain, and Novel has partnerships with Microsoft.

Thinking of conspiracies and such is beyond me. The point is that Microsoft® offers security and a lot of jobs. Since in order to live we require money, it's probably best to have security over hate ;). Just go with the flow and never settle for just one thing.

Hidden gems of Generic Types

This post could have been called "How to find that a type is of a certain generic type ?"
The solution is so simple I would like not to tell you about it, but just in case it will help someone here it goes :

typeof(int?).GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(Nullable<>)

The example is from something I needed to find out. Whenever you generate a nullable type it gets converted by the compiler into a Nullable. E.g. int? --> Nullable. So the example above should be suffice to point you in the right direction if you're searching for a way to find out if a certain object is of a nullable type ;).

Enjoy and take care.

I give up

I've got to 22 words/minute with the keyboard. but since I need to write fast at work since I don't have the resilience to think fast and write slow.. I'm kind'a giving up on the new keyboard at least during the time I need to write fast code.

The really funny part is when I switch from to the other. It's true that I can't expect to switch from something I've used 6+ years to a new layout over night.

Well I'll see what I do