Owen's Blog

No i’ve not been on a sly holiday without telling anyone, more I’ve decided to undo one of the bad habits I picked up in my previous job (Scott i’m blaiming you)

While I call it a bad habit it’s not really, well not in the right context.

Let me explain for the non techies that read the site,

If your Techie and know why i shouldn’t be using Hungarian notation you can stop here

 I’m talking about something called hungarian notation. Basically when your writing software generally it works to adhere to a standard format, so that when i read some code that someone else on the team i don’t have trouble understanding it and vica versa. However one of these techniques has become unfavourable.

It basically says that before a name of a variable, which is a name for a place where you have stored a value, you should put a prefix to say what type of variable it is.

i.e. if i have a statement that says x = 1, where x is an integer (a whole number) hungarian notation states that x shouldn’t be called x, it should be called iX, and then some other rules would come along and you couldn’t call it X (What does x stand for? what does it mean) so for example if it was to store the value of a power regulator switch youd have to call it iPowerRegulatorValue

All good if you ask me.

But with the move to something called until you get a new law that comes along and say that you shouldn’t have two places where you say the same thing. (Called DRY [Don't Repeat Yourself])

now if i hover over the variable in my editor it tells me what type of variable it is.

so i’m repeating information between two places, so i should just be calling the variable powerRegulatorValue.

Also with hungarian notation in .net you tend to call everything objects, so you get a lot of variables that start with obj, a waste of space.

So now i’ve been through all my code i’ve written for ASP.net Fitnesse and taken out all the hungarian notation.

I might find myself doing it again, but hey as long as we keep to standards amongst ourselves, what harm can it do?

During my move around the world I’ve not been keeping up with one of my all time favorite serials the show with zefrank.

So weird that today I click on it in my RSS reader only to find that it’s the final week for ze and all the sports racers… I’ll be sad to see this one go from the web, but it’s good that he’s doing exactly what he said he would. Record 1 years worth, and he’s done one a day (apart from weekends) he’s definately stoic, and I’m sure he’ll relish having his days back a bit.

Miss you Ze

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/

Source: http://blogs.conchango.com/richardgriffin/archive/2007/03/13/WATiN-Recorder_2B002B00_-v-1.0-Released.aspx

this looks like a really interesting development in the world of WATiN, hopefully it’ll lead to an easier adoption of this syntactically rather appealing testing framework for windows applications.

I can feel myself loosing some of the edge i had about 2 years ago, that edge is being able to pick up new things, so in order to challenge myself a little and get back in the learning groove i’ve decided to join the band waggon that is ruby development.

Seems like everyone who’s anyone is using it so as my Mac arrives within a couple of days, and apparently it came with Ruby installed and i just missed it, I thought i would continue my ASP Fitnesse development on my Vista Running Laptop, and use my Mac for some Rails experimentation. I’m still trying to think up some small applications to tinker with but i’m sure something will come hit me as an idea. Currently planning ASP.net Fitnesse takes up a large percentage of my thinking time (read in the shower) so that’ll keep me occupied anyway.

Source: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/12/agile_values/

As if by magic, The Register seems to have covered some of the same ground I did in my last post:

http://www.bgeek.net/node/243

I must be on to something then

There’s been a number of posts floating around the internet as more and more people start to question their old software development ideas and turn over to agile (or at least think about it)

Leon Bambrick someone else who has shared in development at Cresta has an interesting discussion trying to get round why Agile and TDD go together.

Source: http://secretgeek.net/agile_v_tdd.asp

But I was reminded of another point that was made to me long ago by a very good friend and a great agilist, David Evans.

It was a usual retrospective and we were arguing about what processes to keep in and leave out for the next iteration (something i used to seriously enjoy) and then it hit us. We’d been so corralled down the route of explaining why Agile was any good when “it doesn’t keep any processes” and yet we found ourselves with tons of processes to handle and not one we wanted to get rid of. So we suddenly realised that it wasn’t lack of process that made agile, if anything there was more to the processes we were keeping to, it just meant that we weren’t afraid to change the process and only keep those that worked. Why do things just because they are ingrained…. ask you manager or your CEO why he wants that report, why it’s actually of use to him, [often they just like the pretty graphics] ask yourselves what benefit your getting from filling in 101 metrics and which ones don’t add value. And above all CHANGE, it is called Agile for a reason.

So i’m still (after nearly 3 months) without my Mac and i’ve just come across Journler

Source: http://journler.com/

 which seems like quite a neat tool for bloggin from the mac, although Windows Live Writer is really suiting my needs at the moment. A really nice interface and quick easy editing for once.

Well so far so good with regard to ASP.net Fitnesse I’ve managed to put in some hours and we’ve even got a contributor Andy who seems very enthusiastic about the project (we’ll see how long before i grind him down

) However i was contemplating a name change. however Fitnesse.net domain is taken by squatters who want at least 1000 bucks for the name so that’s out. I just think ASP.net Fitnesse is too much of a mouth full. perhaps we should be looking to distance ourselves from Fitnesse a little and try a completely new name…. Fitr seems to be what web 2.0 would call it

Tags: ASPFitnesse Journler

Some people may remember a while back an announcement about a project I was setting up, ASP.net Fitnesse

Well with all the moving and turning my life upside down, I’ve let things slide and haven’t really taken the project off the drawing board, so now I’m settled I’m planning on devoting some time every evening (even if it’s only an hour) to making the project an unqualified success…. actually even if I make it to a single release I’ll be happy.

So if there are any people wanting to help out on said project please let me know.