About over a year+ we had a little application that was leveraging NHibernate for a simple domain. Along all the requirements, one was to generate a pre-defined report with a few simple filters on it. Initial thought was to leverage the same domain we’ve worked out and build report based on that. It was obviously not the best solution there, but once we got the profiling, it was obviously the worse one we could come up with. Re-hydrating entities for reporting was a little bit of a waste. So what would be an alternative without re-investing a lot? We ended up re-using same NHibernate, but in a slightly different manner.

First it was classic ASP, then ASP.NET with WebForms. At the previous company I used to work with it implementing Model-View-Presenter. Since then, I have not touched web development a lot. A lot has changed, and the biggest addition was ASP.NET MVC Framework. Now, there’s a new kid on the blog, that gives ASP.NET WebForms a second change – WebFormsMVP. Check it out.

Back in 2008 I joined Cortex. I was lucky to join a dynamic and growing development team, not afraid of experimenting and pushing the boundaries of Test-driven development. We were on the learning curve from classical state and interaction-based testing to something bigger. Terry and I started to look into ways to reduce the friction and repetition of test initialization and mocking framework usage (RhinoMocks at that time). This was the beginning of the BDD (behavior-driven development) test framework at Cortex that has since evolved into our standard for all of the projects.

Lately I’m involved in a side project for my son’s school web site. It is a simply

Boy was I surprised by incompetence and, what’s worse, by unbelievable lies, the school was fed during some 4 weeks of the project.

Development, QA, Deployment, Production Support, Infrastructure,… it doesn’t matter what aspect of software you are affiliated with. Automation is your best friend. And if it is not, you are living a worse nightmare without yet realizing it.

Our team is striving to as much automation as possible, where possible. But how much automation you can be satisfied with? The sky is the limit. You start seeing ROI of automation a little down the road, probably 3 to 6 months after you’ve committed to apply it no matter how difficult it is.

Looks like more people are looking into OODB. This post I found recently is experimenting with db4o, as well as has a healthy discussion in the comments section. This is ties into what I felt and thought a while ago after reading a book on db4o.

If you are into trance music, check armadamusic out.

This is a good joke. As always, in every joke, there’s a lot of truth.

The question came from my son… and he was right. There’s something wrong with it.