Related link: http://www.ondotnet.com/

I’m pleased and proud to announce that I have started a new bi-weekly column on the O’Reilly Network entitled Liberty On Whidbey”

These columns are designed to give you a flavor of what we’re seeing in the alpha release, and to keep you up to date as beta versions are made available. They will not be a comprehensive tutorial (that is what books are for), but rather glimpses behind the curtain.

The first column is on creating Master/Detail DataGrids with less code and less (visible) ADO.NET.

Related link: http://www.vsj.co.uk/survey/

I’m proud to announce that Programming C# was voted “Book of the Year” by the British site VSJ
You can read all about Programming C# and find extensive support on my web site - click on Books.

Thanks!

Your comments are welcome…

Related link: http://forums.delphiforums.com/LibertyGLBT

I have branched out beyond technical writing and I’m very excited to be taking on new political and other non-fiction assignments.

My first forray is writing a monthly political column for my local newspaper, but I’m also working on articles for other non-technical publications.

If you are interested in any of this, check out my new support site
where I will discuss my political work and also will be posting short pieces such as book reviews.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Related link: http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/page2.html

Andy and Dave (the Pragmatic Programmers) are at it again with a brand new tome, Pragmatic Unit Testing with C#, a look at unit testing using NUnit.

It constantly amazes me how often I come across otherwise knowledgable, competent .NET programmers who haven’t even heard of unit testing let alone NUnit. I mean, here is a technology that took the panic out of programming for me, overnight. Here is a tool without which I can never know that my code is *really* working. And the Java community just gets it. JUnit is built into everything.

Not quite so over on the .NET side, much to my chagrin. I do my best to evangelize it when I can, but Andy and Dave can (and do) do a much better job. I hope this book sells a million copies.

When developing software using agile methodologies, one of the main goals is to keep the customer close. If the customer is fully engaged in the process, they can’t be surprised by results and they can’t complain about not knowing what was going on. Keeping the customer close gives you and them a lot of confidence in your releases.

I’ve tackled several projects this way so far, and a truism has distilled itself out of my experiences: as far as the customer is concerned, the screen IS the application. When the customer shows up in the team room on day three of an iteration, they won’t have a clue when you tell them that all the programmers have been working in the “persistence tier” or that you’ve spent all your cycles on “end-to-end security”. If there isn’t a screen to bang on, they don’t think you’ve been working.

Many development teams I have been involved with have put off working on the UI until one of the final tasks. They believe either:

a) UI development is easy, and can wait until the end, or

b) You have to nail down the backend before you know what the UI should do

In the face of agile development, these rationalizations are just plain wrong. The UI has to happen up front, and concurrent with everything else. The customer, to stay engaged with the team, has to have something experiential to latch on to. For them, code doesn’t cut it. The database schema is ephemeral. Design documents are worse than useless; they imply that you have spent time on something other than code.

So on my latest project, the team decided that on day 1 of the first iteration, we would generate something tangible. Even though that has led to the overall slowing down of the iteration, the customer has been really energized by seeing a UI so fast. For them, it is radically different than any other software development experience they have ever had. Success is entirely defined by being able to interact with the product.

Never let the UI take a back seat to what you feel is “more important”, because what’s important is making your customer happy, and better yet, excited. And the screen is both the app, and the way to their hearts.

Related link: http://www.relevancellc.com

I’d just like to say a big hearty thanks to O’Reilly for not only publishing something I wrote but letting me onto their list of bloggers. It is a pleasure to be associated with O’Reilly, whose books and ethos I have long admired.