New Team System Stuff - 2004-12-09
Visual Studio Team System
- A heads-up from Derek Ferguson, editor-in-chief of the .NET Developer’s Journal (A Look Back – and Moving Forward): “Besides the answer to this month's crossword, our January issue will also feature the absolute best coverage of Microsoft's forthcoming Team System functionality in Visual Studio 2005. Editor Jon Box has been working closely with the folks in Redmond to get the "inside scoop" on this fascinating new technology - so be sure not to miss it!”
- It takes a lot of clicks to get there, but the MSDN Webcast hosted by William J. Steele on Team System (MSDN Webcast: Introduction to Visual Studio Team System—Level 200) from 11/29 is now available for online viewing.
Domain Specific Languages
- Last week, Grady Booch expressed his opinion (Microsoft and Domain Specific Languages) about some of the work Steve Cook and his team have been doing (DSL Tools Workbench) in reply to a post Steve made (Domain Specific Languages and UML). Steve Cook has a reply to Grady’s comments in this post (UML Semantics): “The bottom line is that discussions of UML semantics become political, rather than objective. In consequence, discussions of UML compliance become political, rather than objective. Tool interoperability becomes a political, rather than an objective matter: two UML tools will interoperate if their vendors decide to make this work, rather than by virtue of any objective tests.”
- Gareth Jones has post that discusses the code generator in the October CTP release of the DSL Tools (The mysterious code generator in our October CTP): “In our newsgroup, Bill asked what the deal was with the code generation that we expose via the context menus on the diagram. I thought I'd share my answer a bit more widely…”
- Also, be sure to read this post (Raising the level of software development abstraction) from Aali Alikoski: “Hopefully software factories is the start of a new era of better developer productivity! Time will tell whether that happens, but they have very much potential in doing that IMHO!”
Testing
- Scott Dockendorf has a great article in the December issue of .NET Developer’s Journal on the Unit Testing features of Visual Studio Team System (My First Article – TDD & Visual Studio 2005 Team System): “This article offers a concise look at the timesaving features included in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System's Unit Testing Framework, using a code-first approach to TDD.”
- JS Greenwood has started a series of posts about Test Driven Development (TDD) gone awry:
- The Braidy Tester has an amusing post (Repro This!) on reproducing bugs long after the tester has logged them: “Pop quiz: A tester finds and logs a bug. Some days (weeks (months)) later a developer picks up the bug and runs through it. Lo and behold, the bug does not occur. What should the developer do with this bug?”
- Rudi Larno points to a talk in Brussels that discusses Unit Testing as documentation.
Process & Project Management
- S.B. Chatterjee has a post (What Joel Spolsky may learn from the Indians (empirically speaking)) that offers his opinion on the debate sparked by Joel Spolsky’s post (Saturday, December 4, 2004) on MSF: “MSF is widely used in the Indian software industry and about 3 out 4 of the SEI-CMM certified firms are Indian firms.”
- While process is not a panacea, it is also needed in other parts of the IT industry. See this post (Why we need process, not just tools) from Jonathan Hardwick. Be sure to see this post (Tuesday at CMG 2004 - "A Performance Process Maturity Model") from Jonathan, too.
- Iain McDonald on “a warning sign for a bogus schedule” (Magic Dates?).
Architecture
- Net Objectives has announced their December streamzine (The Bridge Pattern) is now available: “The Bridge Pattern is one of the most common and useful patterns from the book "Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software," by Gamma, Helms, Johnson, and Vlissides. However, it can be a little tricky to understand. This presentation uses a simple example to investigate the Bridge.”
- Matthew Nolton has a post (Another List on SOA.....Ohh and SOA != OO) on the relationship between SOA and OO.