Starting to come together

Well after beginning my rants last week I’ve had a pretty interesting week.  It started off with some replies to my blog post and emails I’d sent following it up.  I’ll go into one of these in detail soon.  I also listened to a .netRocks podcast where they discussed if software development had become to complex.  It addressed a lot of the issues I’ve been having lately and made me realize one the, the most important thing and that is to enjoy what you’re doing.  I brought my head out of the DDD clouds and decided just to start playing with some of the Alt.Net principals.  A current work project highlighted it’s self for this treatment and so with a list of Dimecasts.Net Screen casts and a browser loaded with codebetter.com posts off I went.

Building in the Unit Tests was pretty interesting and proved invaluable in refactoring so me of the initial code I had written.  It also highlighted some of my fundamental failings with regards to C# and .Net development in General.  The positive I’ve taken from this is just getting to a keyboard and creating a piece of software even if you don’t implement 100% best practices and don’t follow to the letter patterns such as DDD, TDD etc.  You’ll have a good time learning and the resulting project will be a great deal better than if you hadn’t tried even if something’s are a big spaghetti it’s all a learning process, use it as such..

I Don’t(as yet) want to publish my results as they are far from finished and I still haven’t got my head round a lot of these principals to the degree where I would feel comfortable writing about them.  The basis of the project was a file notification system to alert of incoming and outgoing files.  The unit test where simple to introduce once I started refactoring and really getting to grips with things like factory patterns etc.   I managed to drop a bit of Linq2xml learning in as well which proved amazingly powerful and has really caught my boss’s eye.  I’ve managed to fit IoC into the repository which has allowed us to switch between xml and sql etc.  Using the quick start guide on the structureMap site it was all simple enough.  Some of the other parts are proving a bit trickier and I’ll need to read up on structureMap for things like Instantiating with constructors etc.  The system will now run as a service and only requires a small amount of tweaking to make it production ready.  I still need to figure out some way of testing the system fileWatcher aspects but I think that’s going to be complicated with possible mock objects etc??

All in all it’s been a really productive week and I just thought I’d let you all know how it went.

As discussed earlier I’d mailed off to a few prominent developers/Podcasters etc and was pleasantly surprised by the feedback I received, showing just how approachable these guys are.  One of the best responses was from Craig Rowe a developer at Web Design Agency HeadScape he supplied me with a number of links that have proved helpful here are some of them

StackOverflow (www.stackoverflow.com) and the stackoverflow podcast (http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.html)

Hanselminutes (http://www.hanselminutes.com/) – Scott Hanselmans podcast

Codebetter – http://codebetter.com/blogs/

A Foundations of Programming eBook by Karl Seguin – http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/06/24/foundations-of-programming-ebook.aspx

In reference to Generics you might find Karl Seguins article useful: http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/11/21/back-to-basics-generics.aspx

Anyways to sum up after feeling a bit lost in the wilderness lately, this last week really has made me feel like I’m starting to get somewhere as a profesional developer.