Shey’s Rebellion

I’m really excited to announce that I will present Unit testing with NUnit at AgilePakistan.org’s first meeting!

In the presentation I will introduce unit testing, discuss the advantages of unit testing and then we’ll look at how to apply unit testing to your .NET application with NUnit.  Time permitting I will also talk about the motivation behind AgilePakistan.org and the agenda for the next few months.

The first meeting will be held at Alchemy Technologies (across from Sammad Clinic and Dadabhoy University near Hill Park) on August 23, 2008 at 4PM.  Seating is limited, please register by email before 11AM, Friday, August 22, 2008.

Hope to see you there!

I don’t know why this isn’t bigger news:  NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended.

Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

My copy of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture came in today– I’m reading it at 4:30 in the morning thinking, "see! I’m not crazy!"

Tom’s talking ’bout his role at his job and I’m still not sure if I really know what he does at work, but his post reminds me of the “5 things you didn’t know about me” meme which was so popular several months ago; in honor of that meme, and because bloggers love talking about themselves I’m tagging Ben and James with the “What do You Do?” meme.

Let me start:

I’m a senior software engineer at a small software development company in Karachi. Most of my work revolves around integrating third party applications, i.e.: Project Server 2007, with Microsoft Dynamics Navision 4.0 (an ERP) and customizing different modules and reports in Nav. I also spend part of my time working on ASP.NET applications and writing Perl scripts to automate Navision migrations.

I use the same development tools that you use, Visual Studio 2005 and jEdit for my editors/IDE, SVN for source control, MbUnit for Unit testing, WATIR for web application testing. The only uncommon tool you’ll find on my computer is Beyond Compare—THE single best file and directory comparison utility I’ve ever used.

So, what do you do?

I’ve been pretty busy lately and I every time I think about writing a post I find myself fighting trackback spam. Akismet has been doing a wonderful job for comments but I need a  solution for trackback spam.

Any advice?

One of the more frustrating things in Consulting: clients who ask you to work for free.

I’ve had two in the last month, one client asked me to work for free because he’s married!

What an incredible disappointment, I’m not happy about this at all. I love Flickr but  I hate Yahoo! I don’t care for the extra features, the Yahoo! integration.

Yuck.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus.

Eclipse is my best friend right now, I think I’ve said that before, if I change my mind, don’t be surprised, I’m always looking for ways to make software development easier. I like having all my tools in one place, it makes me more productive; for my RoR adventures I’ve been using Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools, RadRails and Subclipse plug-in.

Eclipse/RDT gives me easy access to my all my unit tests and a nice graphical interface, source control, I never have to leave the IDE and RadRails is the BEST IDE for RoR development, nothing comes close. I wish Eclipse was more responsive, you can never have enough RAM for Eclipse, but I can’t complain too much. It’s been a much better experience than Jedit and FreeRIDE, although, I still pop open Notepad++ and a console window and hack out some Ruby code every couple of days

This sounds like a giant Ruby commercial, but there’s more to it than the hype. Software development has come a long way for me from the ‘old’ days (~2002) when I programmed in C++ with KDevelop, when my tools were always getting in my way. KDevelop wasn’t very user friendly, neither is C++ or make, now I don’t spend as much time wrangling with my tools. Things just feel easier.

I still miss Intellisense.

Last night I installed SQL Server 2005  and I thought to myself there hasn’t been much press about SQL Server 2005 since its release.  Maybe its because I’ve been into Ruby development lately, but, today I read there hasn’t been a single security flaw reported for SQL Server, no wonder I haven’t heard anything.
Awesome!