Testing testing testing

So anyone who knows me professionally knows that I'm a big fan of test driven development, so it's no surprise that when the LCA2007 conference had some nice testing presentations I was pretty excited (even though it wasn't specifically about TDD, but rather about testing in general).

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend (but for very good reasons - the birth of Nathaniel).

Fortunately the video was released (paper video, tutorial video) soon afterwards.

So Erik has just put the paper online (which I promise I'll read soon). And there's also an (almost blank :) webpage specifying a mailing list too. Hopefully some traction will be built around this.

So I'd encourage people to think about testing their software. Even better, write your tests before you write your software, and watch the video, read the paper, check out some test driven development resources online (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler etc) and sign-up on the mailing list. Let's advance the state of software by building quality in at the start.

tech/sweng | 29 Jun 2007 | #

Moonlight: Silverlight on Linux

Miguel and his team have been busy - 21 days after Microsoft revealed their cross-platform browser-hosted CLR efforts, the free software world have reimplemented a good junk of it.

• Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days (aka Moonlight)
• Another report of the 21-day hackathon at Novell
• Moonlight-based Desklets
• A Mono Developers Guide to writing XAML by hand. (ie. the language of Silverlight)
• Silverlight Surface demo

Besides the cool tech and the flashy demos, what is very impressive by itself is what can be achieved by a small focused team in a small amount of time. Slow viscosity/inertia/velocity (or whatever you want to call it) is the enemy of innovation. Slow development progress begats further slow progress, whereas quick results sky-rockets the motivation of the team. Seriously, the more projects I see, the more I'm convinced that if you can get the obstacles and interruptions out of the way then you have a great chance to get a coherent, innovative, quality software product developed quickly. It's less about process, it's less about documentation, and it's more about focus.

The hackfest/sprint is certainly under-utilised as a software development lifecycle today.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 29 Jun 2007 | #