A Thoughts on a real-world application

There’s now two weeks since I wrote my last blog. I had some “emotional problems” and of course I get the late invitation for CASE21. It won’t be a seminar but only lecture and I had to do overnight work to accomplish the lecture.

Last Saturday, I was also “conducting” electronic processing of a Championship of swimming with fin for Croatian Diving Federation (CDF) and they have “some kind of” software made with Microsoft Access and VBA (Visual Basic for Application) which is poorly designed and very unpredictable in using (you can expect everything to go wrong, anytime and in each championship there’s some kind of problem with this application). And while no one knows how to use it (lack of computer knowledge and work in some real-world application),  I am condemned to struggle with this poorly designed and not extensible application.

So now, as I have some kind of understanding how this application called “FinSwim” works and more of it I have regulations book of CDF with all rules. I decide to use at as a model for my real-world application. So when I don’t understand or how it works, from current application, I can read and made it clear from regulations book of CDF.

Application is not so complex in model sense but has quite some validations, rules, statistics, scoring and great deal of reporting. The final result of championship is bulletin of all happenings at championship.

More of it in next posts!

C# learning roadmap

Mainly I deicide to blog knowledge which I read/learn from programming books that I bought. But there will be blogging about setting an Agile Software Development environment or some doubts on the best suited environment for my needs. Especially for making some kind of real-world application.

In First Phase of learning I’ll start to sharp my knowledge of C#. My main idea is to write all the things I’ve learned from reading and experimenting with C# language features and/or .NET base class libraries.

There are three books I bought and respect them a lot and I want absorb their knowledge and blog them as a reference:

1. Jeffrey Richter – CLR via C#, Second Edition : Great internals on C# and CLR
2. Joseph & Ben Albahari – C# 3.0 In a Nutshell : Great quick reference on C# 3.0
3. Jon Skeet – C# In Depth : Brilliant book about the heart of C# language and my primarily roadmap for learning C# in Depth

The Second Phase of learning is setting up an environment for Agile Software Development mainly:

• Source Control – now I’m in doubt on using Git or Subversion as client or some variant of this source controls repositories available on Internet like GitHub or XP-Dev
• Continuous Integration – JetBrains TeamCity or maybe CruiseControl.NET but CI will have build tool NAnt, code coverge tool NCover and if NDepend is have some free or community version.
• Agile Project Management – Set up TargetProcess or maybe Rails based Redmine or something else?!

The Third Phase of learning will be building a real-world applications with modern programming principles in mind (DDD, TDD, S.O.L.I.D, BDD, ORM), but also the goal is the not to postpone the UX, and all project documentation from planning to designing the application. For this phase I should blog in near future about all my thoughts on what real-world applications will be, and all technologies that will be a part of application. For now my goal is MVC like web application, but would be also nice to make WPF application.

The idea for all written code will be to be in spirit with great book Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition)  by Krysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams and tools like fxCop and StyleCop.

The Forth Phase is for now SF, but I always wanted be a part of some OpenSource project, now primarily I want to be a part of some .NET project. Even though super SF would be to do start new and useful OpenSource  project by myself!

Even I break learning in phases this doesn’t mean that I’ll blog only one phase and when that phase is over then go to another phase. And I really think that Second Phase will be over far before than First Phase!

CASE 21 – Thoughts on my seminar

These days I’m arranging thoughts for seminar for CASE 21. The seminar last for about four hours so I have time to do some complex things.

My thoughts for this seminar is essentially on Agile Development and setting all necessary surroundings for Agile Development.

Including:

• TDD – In doubt of using NUnit 2.5 or xUnit 1.1,
• Continuous Integration (CI) – Abandoning CruiseControl an I’ll give a try to JetBrains TeamCity,
• Agile Project Management – TargetProcess Community Edition,
• Version Control or SCM – Subversion by VisualSVN or if I would be crazy enough to setup a Git with msysGit,
• ORM – The one and only NHibernate with his Fluent NHibernate,
• DDD – some concepts explained,
• MVC and MVVM – ASP.NET MVC
• BDD ? – with SpecUnit.NET which using xUnit testing framework so NUnit is out definitely,
• Framework Guidelines like Naming Conventions and Commenting code for API documentation,
• and maybe Uncle Bob’s (Robert C. Martin)  S.O.L.I.D principles.

I think that would be mostly all, don’t know yet how to name a seminar, maybe “Agile Software Development in .NET” or something like in this lines.

And now, I see that I have to register work to seminar till 17.04.2009. Now I have to send email to see if they will take me.