Month: July 2007

I came across this James Avery post via Mike Gunderloy’s blog.  Avery attempts to make a similar point to one Martin Fowler puts forward about the best developers moving away from the .NET platform.  Beyond the sort of anecdotal evidence I’ve read, I don’t see much abandonment of .NET as a platform.

When I read this post by Dave Laribee, I decided that Avery missed his point.  The point of ALT.NET isn’t as a bridge to a different set of tools, but to recognize two things:

1. The best solutions on the .NET platform won’t always come from Microsoft.
2. The best ideas from other software development communities can work very well on the .NET platform.

The existence of tools like NUnit and log4net, frameworks like Spring.NET and rules engines like Drools.net is more likely to keep developers using the .NET Framework than it is to encourage them to switch to Ruby on Rails.  Because a lot of ALT.NET is free and open source, there’s plenty of incentive to use it instead of the Microsoft alternative (which increasingly comes with hefty licensing fees).

I learned an annoying lesson about these late last week.  I’d created the dataset by dragging and dropping the necessary tables from SQL Server in Visual Studio 2005.  Then I added a query to one of the tables that didn’t include every one of its columns.  Unfortunately, a number of the columns my query didn’t return didn’t allow nulls.  I ended up modifying my query to include those columns, even though I don’t use them.  I didn’t try removing the columns from the dataset, but that probably would have worked too.

Scott Westfall, a member of the SlickEdit development team, weighs in with three “theorems of programming languages”.  The second theorem (If programmers do not understand a piece of code, they will either break it or rewrite it.) is definitely, and painfully true.

There’s a Codeplex project that enables developers to use their Subversion clients with Team Foundation Server (TFS). It’s certainly an interesting project, though I don’t quite grasp the rationale. TFS is really expensive, so if a shop can afford it, they can afford Team Explorer too.

I found out about initially via TheServerSide.NET.

This piece by Martin Fowler interests me more for his contention that the best technical leaders are abandoning .NET than for what he writes about Ruby. It’s the sort of argument that seems true because anecdotal evidence seems readily available.  I’d be interested to see if there’s more quantitative backing for the assertion.

Some poking around on Google did reveal at least a couple statistics:

• Computer language use by projects in SourceForge (9/2000-2/2006)
• Programming Language Popularity

Apparently this is where Visual Studio 2005 stores connection strings when you add strongly-typed datasets in an application.  Even though I had an app.config file and I’d changed it to point to a new database, I was still getting SqlExceptions when I ran my unit tests.  I just didn’t know the old value was still stored in Settings.settings and needed to be updated.