So a few Scientists and a few developers met last Wednesday. It was hard to know where we were going to end and thanks so much to everyone that participated. The following is a summary of the tips we (scientist + developers) thought was a good idea

Tips for scientists writing code (1st Round):

• Talk to other scientists that work on similar projects and share a list of your most used functions (I cant remember the name of the person suggestion
• Every now and then meet up with other scientist writing similar code to you to talk specifically about the code you write, after all if you know the tools you are working with better, you are bound to be more productive
• Use source control. There are pretty good open source alternatives and many places that offer free storage. Some source control options: Git, Mercurial, subversion. Some places to host your code: github, bitbucket, google code, codeplex
• Use variable names that indicate what you are talking about.
• Some bad examples: your_cat_name, sss, ttt, etc. Some good examples: portionOfSphere, portion_of_sphere.
• In the case of IDL, avoid for loops and try to use functions
• Try to get used to reading others people code so that you realise where you can improve, or point out things that can be done i na more effective way

 Help a scientist day

The above is all well and good, however. We were also thinking about collaboration. So Philippe came up with a great idea: Help a scientist day.

• A scientist submits (somewhere to be discussed) a problem she or he thinks it could be solved with some help of more developers
• people can ask questions about the idea (either technical details or just to check that its a problem similar to theirs)
• People can vote on ideas (no need to sign up )
• The ideas with most votes (that are doable) will be the ones that will be implemented by developer during “Help a Scientist Day”

So, we need to organize this day, please comment on G+ so we can get this going

Cheers

XNA is the SDK from Microsoft for game development.

• XNA getting started tutorial. Well organized, paced  series of  XNA tutorials by a guy that teaches this. If you know nothing this is pretty good.
• Xna workshop. Some posts and links to learn XNA Is kinda handy to see other people’s questions
• Riemers XNA Tutorials. I think this is a link you want to keep, every time I search for something XNA related I get a post from this guy
• 2D Camera with parallax scrolling. Does what it said on the tin, very comprehensive article that also links to other interesting articles.
• Mono game. The good news is that there is a port … “MonoGame is an open source implementation of the XNA APIs that allows developers to build 2D games that run on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code base, or reusing existing XNA code that runs on Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7″

If you know of other good details, please comment

In the last few years the tooling available to .net developers for unit testing in general has matured, these are some of the tools  that I either used or heard of :

Continuous Integration:

• Team City: I use it and really like it, simple to set up and use, if you want to try it they have a free professional edition .
• Cruise Control.net: Open source, used it but didnt find it too friendly, I m aware a lot of people use it
• Hudson. Originally a Java only project but there are some success stories on the .net fence, has some features unavailable in the other two mentioned above.
• there must be something else. ?

• StoryQ:  This is what I use. Like it because you write C# code with some constraints and it generates reports on the behaviour. Samples: code report
• Cukes/Cucumber: I remember the first time I saw cucumber in action I was really impressed, however it’s hard to get buy in for a tool that requires another language installed, probably fine for some projects, it depends a lot on the project, the company and the culture.
• SpecFlow:  you write features in Gherkin(the cucumber spec language) that are then compiled into c# code. Nice reports, but I find the generated code hard to read… ie a bit too verbose (example feature example generated code) however I wouldnt discard it totally.
• NSpec:  You write c# code (very lambda-y)  and it generates reports.. like it even less for reasons similar to the above,  have a look at it yourself here
• Fit/fitnesse:  I haven’t tried it, it supposed to be very good, I ll leave that one to you (would love some feedback on this if anyone reading did try it)

Unit Testing Frameworks.

• xUnit: a nice, compact unit test framework, I like it because it has less noise,  no setup method (ie it uses the ctor for
• nUnit:  The most popular one.
• mbUnit: good support for RowTests.
• _
• msTests: the option by Microsoft. I tried this framework when it came out, so perhaps not valid anymore. My experience with it was that the same set of test ran 20% slower. Also it had poor support for theory tests. Maybe this all changed. I will guess that anyone using this framework does it because they can’t use anything else

Builds

• Psake:  powershel based DSL for building
• Rake:  Ruby based Dsl for builds, nice to use ruby, but sometimes needing the ruby dependency is a deal breaker
• Nant: not something I would choose, but hey if you like xml this is the way to go (if you like Xml you might want to talk to your doctor too )
• MSBuild:  I find it non intuitive, I thought I was being unfair so I asked in twitter what ppl thought of it. One supporter and 4 not really happy with it (see below)
• Final Builder : a commercial option, and not a bad one to be honest. Very easy to use (drag drop style) tho not as flexible as we needed.

During the past weekend I was at DDD Scotland, it was great to meet all the people there.

I  apologize for the amount of lolcalts that I added to my presentation (available below) and any feedback, etc more than welcome.

In many ways it was good to get the presentation out of the way early  because it meant I could focus on being out there listening to other folks smarter than me talk and meet some people.

After my talk I was at Gary Short’s presentation on hoe to measure performance, interesting and really well delivered. Some interesting questions too.

Then I was at Seb Rose talk on TDD and unit testing. It was interesting to see that you can test drive a C++ app. His advice was sound. He talked about the importance of setting a structure before starting to test. He talked about the importance of deployment. And how it was important that the tests were also clean and well designed. Link to his slides

After that there was lunch, unfortunately (or not)  I couldnt catch any of the grok talks as I was talking to people, one of the ideas we had was to open source a project (not mine :S) that would make using selenium+qunit on CI easier… will see how that goes.

After that I joined a talk by Toby Henderson,  The dark parts of Mono. I reallly enoyed this talk. Info about small standalone tools or libraries that you can use, with examples. Such as IKVM, Cecil, SIMD, Compiler and Gendarme.

Finally, I joined the “Ask the Speakers” panel, very relaxed and quite fun. We talked about the news (Mono and its future, other stuff I cant remember – please comment),  innovation and community. There is a post of note that goes into some of the stuff we talked about .

All in all a great event, thanks to everyone for making it possible.

I ve been talking to some people over the past few months about CQRS, particularly CQRS/ES and at some point of the conversation I get the framework question.

I think the implementation of the patterns CQRS and ES is not trivial (it’s also not necessary to do both , but lets keep going) however, the escence of the advantages you get out of both comes from implementing the rules of the domain, in the domain. By making the state transitions explicit.

The number one reason why you should learn about CQRS without a framework is because, it could cloud your understanding of the domain with artificial constraints. Another important reason is that when you learn by doing, you understand the workings and shortcomings of a particular methodology.

That is not to say that frameworks are bad and you should never use them, but make sure that when you make a decision like that, it is a conscious one.

I remember one day when I was at a talk by Gregg Young, and he said: How many of you use (ms)SQL? How many of you made that conscious choice? (ie to use an relational database for storage) .  I realised then that, I didn’t make that choice or considered an option in certain cases, but what scared me the most is that I was making a bunch of assumptions as soon as anyone said “system” , it made me realise that most of those assumptions could blind me into not really considering all the options.