RE: The Simplicity Manifesto

5 11 2008

At one time or another I signed up for a free subscription to Visual Studio Magazine, probably because it is free, and occasionaly I’ll read an article if it catches my eye.  Today I happened across an article titled “The Simplicity Manifesto” and thought it could be interesting, and that it was.

I didn’t get far into the article before I ran across this statement.

Outside of Apple Inc., simplicity and elegance don’t carry much weight in the development community.

Obviously this guy must have been hiding under a rock for the last decade and never heard of Agile development, or read anything by guys like Bob Martin, Kent Beck, or Martin Fowler. I know in my own day to day development I try to strive for simplicity and elegance, as do many of the developers I’ve worked with in the past, even the ones who don’t practice some sort of Agile methodology.


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Microsoft targeting Java developers for Silverlight

14 10 2008

There was an article on ComputerWorld yesterday titled Microsoft woos developers under the Silverlight.  It would appear that Microsoft is now targeting Java developers for their Silverlight RIA platform.

Microsoft is funding a French open-source project to build tools that would enable programmers to use the popular open-source Eclipse framework to write Silverlight applications, said Brian Goldfarb, a director in Microsoft’s developer platform division, in an interview last week. This should also let Eclipse programmers share their Silverlight applications with developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio framework, Goldfarb said. The project is being hosted on SourceForge.

So I decided to look into this Eclipse plugin to see what it was all about.  The plugin homepage can be found here.  Those of you who know me, know that I’m no Eclipse fanboy, I’m more of an IntelliJ kind of guy, but I find this announcement rather intriguing.  It would appear that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in a plugin for Eclipse that would allow people to do C# development using something other than their own product.  Next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing Visual Studio will be migrating to the Eclipse platform and .NET developers will now have an IDE that doesn’t completely suck.  Sorry Microsoft, but if it weren’t for ReSharper, developing in Visual Studio would be unbearable.


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Continuous Integration with Flex

16 01 2008

Earlier today I had posed a question to a mailing list in the .NET community asking about Continuous Integration with Flex in the .NET world. After a couple of answers from people who obviously did not understand the question, because they just told me to google CruiseControl.NET, someone with some knowledge of TDD and Agile practices stepped up and pointed out the obvious point I was trying to make. There currently is no real good way to automate your FlexUnit tests in such a way that a CI server like CC.NET or HudsonCI would know whether or not all of the tests for your Actionscript classes passed or failed.

So I’ve decided to start a Google Code project called agile-flex, where a couple of other developers and I will attempt to build some agile tools for the Flex framework, starting with a test runner that will help enable continuous integration for Java, .NET, or even just plain old Actionscript. The runner will likely be based off an article I found from Aaron Spjut here. In a nutshell we will create a test runner in Adobe AIR that will generate XML output similar to JUnit and NUnit for the CI server to be able to interpret. This will also enable the generation of report artifacts using the JUnit Report tasks or even a custom XSLT if desired. I’ll post more details as the project continues.

UPDATE… The Flex-Mojos project now fulfills this need, so I’ve deleted the Google Code Project that we started for this.


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