Tanuj Mathur and I presented at the .NET Unboxed conference about alternative web frameworks for .NET. We compared and contrasted Nancy, ServiceStack and ASP.NET WebAPI. The conference recorded it and published it on YouTube. Check it out! Continue reading
Category Archives: Agile
ServiceStack 4 HTTP Utilities: Functional Contract Testing
ServiceStack 4 HTTP Utilities: Functional Contract Testing ServiceStack 4 comes with some really great new tools for accessing an HTTP resource using a fluent syntax. They make a great addition – sometimes the JsonServiceClient (often just called the C# client) is a little too smart! For instance, let’s say you’ve published a specification saying how … Continue reading
Seven Reasons to Love Duck Angular
Duck Angular A team I’m working with saw a gap when they were testing AngularJS apps: Functional regression, while necessary, didn’t provide fast enough feedback. Using unit testing techniques they could obviously test the JavaScript functions behind their Angular controllers, but that didn’t help them assert that bindings were correct or that directives actually manipulated … Continue reading
Are Tech Tasks Useful Work?
A project I’m aware of recently started discussing in their retrospectives that they wanted to start assigning points to tech tasks. I’m a big believer in allowing a team to exercise control over its own process — so in my mind the right answer is to let the team make the call. I do have some thoughts … Continue reading
Organizational Risk: Building Trust
In my last post, talking about Organizational Risk, I advocated for a meeting once per iteration with members of different departments to reduce the kinds of project throughput risks that can stem from an dev team practicing agile working within a larger waterfall oriented organization. What might a meeting like this look like? Infrastructure & … Continue reading
Organizational Risk
Transforming an organization is a difficult business. One common pattern is the development team takes up the charge, practicing scrum and XP techniques. However, they may find their agile team working with a waterfall oriented Enterprise Architecture and Web Operations department. There’s an impedance mis-match here that can result in risk to your project, particularly … Continue reading
“Bring a Laptop, Will Code” Events
“Bring a Laptop, Will Code” Events I’ve always found events where you are expected to participate by coding the most interesting. You can see how your fellow developers think, possibly see other environments, and actually sharpen your skills. Often during the work day, developers have time pressures and business interests to factor in – this … Continue reading
If your job ad asks for a “XYZ Software Developer”, you may be doing it wrong.
If your job ad for a software developer states the language or tools you expect them to use after they start, you may be doing it wrong. Smart developers should be able to pick up almost any language quickly when they’re working together, particularly if they’re pair programming Smart developers are good programmers in whatever … Continue reading
Test Driven Development with KnockoutJS, VisualStudio, and Karma: Binding to the View
In our last post, we created a ViewModel which models the basic functionality we would like on the page. As a reminder, we have a Knockout “observable array” of items suitable for binding; each item is a JavaScript object containing a title and description in addition to a value called complete which indicates if this … Continue reading
Test Driven Development with KnockoutJS, VisualStudio, and Karma
I’m giving a presentation on KnockoutJS and TDD at DevTeach in Toronto on Wednesday. I’ll be doing a live code demo, which is always exciting (at least for the presenter). I thought I’d write a quick article recording the steps I go through as part of the demo. Legacy Code Legacy Code, according to my … Continue reading
Software Development 