A bit of “googling” turned up these links:
- An MSDN entry on the subject
- This link to a Power Toy for automating the creation of VSI files
Category: Opinion
Visual Studio Templates for Test-driven Development
I came across this blog post earlier today via Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware.com. One of the comments requested .VSI files (the templates are for NUnit and MbUnit and are made available as zip files). That probably would be a nicer way to package this. Even without it, I’m glad to see anything that encourages test-driven development. I’ll definitely use this with my development team soon. I should probably learn how to create VSIs anyway.
India Skills Gap
I came across this article in one of the e-mail newsletters I subscribe to. It’s highly relevant to my current role because we use a lot of offshore staff for our work through companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
The rise in salaries and the springing up of private schools for training people in IT is just what basic economic theory would predict. The quality concerns are predictable as well. Before I joined APS, I asked some consulting colleagues how they would rate the various Indian IT firms. They had strong opinions on which firms were best. A lot depended on where they recruited and how experienced their hires typically were.
One area the post didn’t address that is quite important is turnover. Because salaries in India are going up, that makes it challenging for firms to retain talent for any length of time. This can certainly impact quality for companies like mine that use one or two offshore firms exclusive because we just don’t know who they’re backfilling with when they lose talent to other companies.
It’s certainly possible that India could start losing IT work to China. But I suspect that eastern Europe and some of the former Soviet republics are just as likely to get some of that work. Philip G. Armour’s column in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM talks about a technology firm in the midwest that’s been quite successful with an offshore team in the Ukraine.
Visual SourceSafe Tidbit
I administer my employer’s VSS and Team Foundation Server (TFS) instances as part of my job. As a first-time administrator of these sorts of systems, there’s plenty I’m still learning. Today I found out that moving folders doesn’t work unless the user trying to execute the move has “Destroy” permissions.
The SHAPE command is the bane of my existence
I inherited some classic ASP code not long ago that needed some enhancement. The look-and-feel of the site is pretty nice, but under the covers there’s tons of the inline SQL I hate so much. But worse than that is the previous developer’s use of the SHAPE command. I’d never used it, even when I last wrote classic ASP with my own hands (around 2003). Once this project is over, I hope never to see it or use it again. I’m really struggling to understand how it works (and why things were done this way). I’m hoping this article will help me figure it out. I’m grateful that someone took the time to actually develop a formal grammar for this command. It reminds me a lot of the BNF notation we learned as 1st year computer science majors in college.
10 Years
I was in the middle of writing my self-evaluation for work (review time is coming up) when I realized that the end of 2006 marked my 10th year of working full-time in software development.
Goodbye 2006, Hello 2007
First, to my readers (all three of you), I hope that 2006 treated you well and that 2007 is even better.
2006 treated me pretty well as years go. I actually kept the “get in better shape” resolution I made last year by joining these guys. There’s 25 pounds less of me right now than there was at this time last year. I took up a new hobby (skiing). I bought a new car. I also got to do some traveling (Killington, VT for skiing and San Francisco, CA for vacation). I learned enough of a new programming language (Ruby) to try a startup idea with Sandro. A few months ago, I got a new job (and a nice raise as a result).
I haven’t made any resolutions for 2007 (outside of “get in better shape”). I’ve been seeing more of these “101 things in 1001 days” lists (like this one and this one) lately. While I don’t think I’m nearly as ambitious as my friends, there are some things I’ve been thinking about doing that would be good to attempt this year:
- Learn a new programming language. One of the consultants that works for me has had a lot of good things to say about Eiffel. So far, I’ve installed the development environment, read a bit of documentation, and written a bit of sample code. There’s a small product idea I’d like to try, and I plan to use Eiffel to do it.
- Incorporate. My friend Richard has been encouraging me to do this for years now, instead of being a regular employee for some company. He’s been working for himself as long as I’ve known him (at least 12 years now) and has done very well. So far, I’ve bought a couple of domain names and done enough budgeting to determine what my hourly rate should be if I were to go into IT consulting.
- Re-learn the piano. I was good enough at it when I was younger that my last piano teacher wanted me to go to school at the Peabody Institute. Spending the past couple of years as a sound engineer for one of the services at my church just made me miss being able to play even more. Since I can still read music, I need to do something more with it.
- Study the Bible more regularly. Some years ago, I took a Disciple Bible Study class at my church. We covered 75-80% of the Bible over the course of a year. It was a very spirtually-rewarding experience. I want to get (and keep) my life in enough balance that I can make some Bible study a part of each day.
- Take a two-week vacation. 2005 was the first year I’d taken more than a week off in a row since my undergraduate days (back in the mid 90s). I took a bus tour through western Europe for nearly two weeks with my dad (and about 50 other people) and had an excellent time. It really helped me disconnect from work concerns, and I’m positive I’ll need to do that again this year.
More on databases and business logic
This particular entry in the “forever war” of whether to use object-relational mapping or stored procedures does a better job than most in these ways:
- It changes the argument from “either-or” to a situational one.
- It broadens the scope of database objects in the discussion beyond stored procedures to include functions, triggers, views, constraints, and referential integrity.
- It rates the suitability of each database object to a particular task.
I found the article especially relevant to my current job because of how many projects I’m responsible for that have huge amounts of business logic captured in stored procedures hundreds of lines long. As far as I can tell, much of the reason for the length of these stored procedures is that they’re being used to represent workflows. SQL doesn’t look like the best way to implement those to me, so I suspect I’ll be looking at Windows Workflow Foundation a lot more closely in the very near future.
Source Code Control
I came across this post from Joel Spolsky last week (though I’m just now getting around to blogging about it). We’re using Team Foundation Server for source code control at work, and we’ve managed to have the problems of check-ins breaking the build and too few check-ins to have a good delta of changes at the same time. While the applications we build at APS Healthcare aren’t the size of an operating system as far as lines of code, the branching-and-merging idea Spolsky describes would probably be useful to us.
Working with IT agencies
I have to deal with IT agencies a lot more now as a software development manager than I ever did in previous roles. So coming across a blog post titled “IT Agencies and the Devil” was pretty funny. If starting an IT agency is as simple as the author suggests, it certain explains why there seem to be so many of them.
So far, I can single out one such agency for providing people that are consistently high-quality–Software Consortium. The guys they’ve sent to work on the projects I’m responsible for have all turned out excellent code and been very good about knowledge-sharing.