Occasionally you come over a really GREAT website about things that interest you.

Today I found another one:

http://sourcemaking.com/

It’s focused on three topics and covers them to great extent:
- Design patterns
- Refactoring
- Anti-patterns

All three topics are dear to my heart, so this great site is really a great reference!

Cheers!

So your venturing into your own waters, got a brilliant idea about the product and now your picking up the bits to make it happen.

Two tools you will defiantly need are Source Control and Project Management.

Well, there are several options.

For source control, my best suggestion would be SVN. I would suggest it even for larger companies (I am sooo crying right now because we are too deep in Source Safe that we can’t switch over… from the other side, all my personal projects are in SVN).

One great free option is Google Code… http://www.googlecode.com

You can setup your projects there, manage them and everything… it works great.

Also, SVN generally isn’t hard to host… you can bring it online in a matter of minutes (probably it takes more to download it then to set it up :))

Ok, so the other part is Project Management… I am personally a proponent of Scrum, like the tools I try to use… it seems so frictionless, no hassle, no fuss… just easy and simple methodology to manage my projects. Again, I would be really happy that we don’t have our own internal methodology so I could utilize it… but at least this way, I just “rip” off from it bits and pieces I can use easily implement and that bring real benefit to my projects… e.g. daily standup’s.

Back… now, two tools I’ve found easy enough, free and quick. Both are free for small teams and small projects, both are hosted online and both are quick&easy:

- http://www.acunote.com/ - Scrum based online project management tool. Seems really good.

- http://www.basecamphq.com/ - Not Scrum based, but still quick&easy

Hope this gives you some ideas! I am taking for a ride Acunote and GoogleCode on my Akua framework (although it is my private, non profit project… still it could benefit from some PM, and SC is already there :)):

http://vladanstrigonet.googlecode.com/svn/akua/trunk

Cheers!

Together with the guys from my company I’ve been able to establish a blog through which we as a company will be able to express our opinions, interests and details of the work we do as well as little secrets of the trade.

The success of the idea is guarantied as not more than a month has passed since it’s inception and already we have some 10-15 posts there.

Go check it out:

http://blog.netmedia.hr

If your asking yourself why did we make one?

Well I see the advantage of having a corporate blog from multiple view points, I won’t go into details (as I have work to do), but here are just a few:

a) Education - I hope to raise the awareness of our teams and show them that there is a world of good ideas and smart people out there that doesn’t sleep after 16:00 or 17:00 hours each day (after the work time is over)

b) Knowledge-base - I’ve found it myself and read it through other people’s blogs - My blog serves me as a reminder sometimes, not to mention a knowledge-base - why not express good ideas through it and have other guys and people not within the company benefit from it?

c) Marketing obviously

d) …

So follow our blog! There is already a ton of interesting content there

Cheers!

Finally some news. I’ve been really pissed of that as an MVP for ASP.NET I cannot get into the group which gets the early bits of the new MVC framework but it looks like it’s going to be released to the public anyway so ok (although I am still not ok that it was a very closed circuit).

So, the news is… seems like we are going to see it (and allot of other goodies) sometime next week as ScottGu mentions in his blog here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/29/net-web-product-roadmap-asp-net-silverlight-iis7.aspx

So, interested in knowing what’s next? Interesting getting the early bits?

Then read the above blog post for more details on the future of the platform and the general roadmap.

Cheers!

Finally!

Too bad I am not there… personally I would rather be there then on TechEd.

Ok.. back to the subject… Earlier this year on the MVP summit in Seattle Scott Guthrie announced that they might (finallly :)) build a real MVC framework.

Well… seems they were woring hard on it and now finally Scott is ready to go public with some of the concepts as Jeffrey mentiones here:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeffrey.palermo/archive/2007/10/05/altnetconf-scott-guthrie-announces-asp-net-mvc-framework-at-alt-net-conf.aspx


By the things he is saying it will be pretty good… I just hope someone will make a video of Scott’s presentation so I can view it

Can’t wait for Scott to publish some more details himself!

… and I am telling you this by raising my right hand :)

Check this out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-317659265568822821

this guy is funyyy

Wow! That’s all I can say…

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx


Can you imagine how great this will be for debugging, learning code, learning ways to code (although this is doubtfull :)), learning how a given functionality works in detail (although this can already be done with Reflector, but still not as many details as the original code)…. Wow!

Go check it out.


Cheers!

Just got an email from a prudct manager from Microsoft.

Some introduction:

We just released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months. This guide shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It’s a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

• Part I, “Fundamentals,” gives you a quick overview of team development with Team Foundation Server. You’ll see the big picture in terms of your software development environment, including the development and test environment. You’ll also learn the basic architecture of Team Foundation Server.

• Part II, “Source Control,” shows you how to structure your source code and manage dependencies. It also shows you how to determine a branching and merging strategy if you need isolation for your development efforts.

• Part III, “Builds,” shows you how to set up team builds, how to produce continuous integration builds for your development team, and how to drop scheduled builds to your test team. It also discusses common problems and how to work around them.

• Part IV, “Large Project Considerations,” show you additional considerations you need to deal with when working with large projects.

• Part V, “Project Management,” shows you how to use Team Foundation Server work items, areas and iterations to streamline your development process regardless of what project management approach you use.

• Part VI, “Process Templates,” shows you how to get the most out of the process templates and process guidance that is supplied with Team Foundation Server out of the box. It also shows how you can customize the process templates, and make modifications to work items and workflow to map to the software engineering process your team is already using.

• Part VII, “Reporting,” shows you how all of the other Team Foundation Server components integrate their data store into a common reporting mechanism. You’ll learn how to use the default reports as well as how to build your own custom reports.

• Part VIII, “Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment,” removes the mystery from Team Foundation Server deployment. You’ll learn how to choose between a single server and multiple server deployment. You’ll also learn how to support remote development teams and how to maximize Team Foundation Server performance.

• Part IX, “Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server”, shows the changes that are coming in the next version of Team Foundation Server. You’ll learn what new features are planned as well as what features are going to be significantly improved. Some of the changes impact the guidance we give elsewhere in this guide, so use this section to improve your Team Foundation Server upgrade planning.

This guide is available at: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide. We will be making this available at MSDN as well.

So go ahead and get it now to learn even more about TFS!

Just received an email from my MVP Lead - Anka with a message “Did you see this?” and a link to GotDotNet site.

What I’ve seen there is interesting to me… GotDotNet is shutting down, and it’s projects are being reallocated to other Microsoft community sites.

On the site there, there is a more detailed plan how this will be done. Enough to say that if you are watching over some of the projects there and not visiting the home page of the site (like me :().


If you are asking yourself why am I mentioning this… simply said, it would be nice not to loose track of some of the nice projects which are there once they are moved, and if you are like me (didn’t see it), it will be of some significance to you.


Cheers!

I’ve updated my resources section with a great resource from DNN community.

Visit my resources page for details…

While going through my blog list, found some articles that I would like to link here:

Jon Henning

• Researching MS AJAX: PageMethods
• Researching MS AJAX: ScriptControlBase and Callbacks

Eilon Lipton

• Attributes to consider applying when writing a custom control

Enjoy!

Then read this post, it does a great job summarizing various debugging issues you might encounter:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mkpark/articles/86872.aspx


Courtesy of Rodney Joyce of http://www.smart-thinker.com

When I’ve started .NET development some of my „dearest“ examples of implementation were from Paul Wilson, when I remember his templates, his web form and other examples – they really gave me some insight into the things I was interested.

With his releases of ORMapper, UIMapper and other tools he raised the bar of simplicity in the objectified world.

And now he does it again, he released a DataSourceControl for his ORMapper – again the very edge of simplicity – do check it out on his blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/archive/2006/05/17/446919.aspx


As with all the best examples – usually we can all do them ourselves – but rarely we spend our free time doing them – and all for free!

Every morning I find a bunch of great content on the blogs I follow, here are only a few from this morning:

Shaun Walker - DotNetNuke 3.3 / 4.1 Release Status - http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/420/Default.aspx


ScottGu again posts some great posts:

VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Release Coming Shortly - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/02/444847.aspx

CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/02/444850.aspx



Cheers!

One of the most interesting ideas I have seen lately, community credit. Basically they award your efforts in your community with all kinds of geeky prizes.

Their moto is:

“We give stupid prizes to smart people”

I think Ill send a mail to the guy in charge and see how we can combine our community sites with his great idea. Until then you can go over there and sign-up to win prizes:

http://www.community-credit.com