Tanuj Mathur and I presented at the .NET Unboxed conference about alternative web frameworks for .NET. We compared and contrasted Nancy, ServiceStack and ASP.NET WebAPI. The conference recorded it and published it on YouTube. Check it out! Continue reading
ServiceStack 4 Cookbook
If you are a .NET developer who is looking for a simpler way to build services, this is the book for you. It will show you how to write fast, maintainable APIs that are a pleasure to use and maintain starting from the database to the client and everything in-between. Comprehensive coverage of the Redis library, … Continue reading
Microsoft Open Sources .NET – The History Behind the Announcement
While I’m still surprised at the move, it’s not unprecedented – I think they’ve been letting the open source folks dabble for years now, and they’ve proven that it works. 2007/2008 – MS starts building ASP.NET MVC While this wasn’t a move to open source anything, it did finally start to seem as though Microsoft … Continue reading
ServiceStack 4 HTTP Utilities: Functional Contract Testing
ServiceStack 4 HTTP Utilities: Functional Contract Testing ServiceStack 4 comes with some really great new tools for accessing an HTTP resource using a fluent syntax. They make a great addition – sometimes the JsonServiceClient (often just called the C# client) is a little too smart! For instance, let’s say you’ve published a specification saying how … Continue reading
Seven Reasons to Love Duck Angular
Duck Angular A team I’m working with saw a gap when they were testing AngularJS apps: Functional regression, while necessary, didn’t provide fast enough feedback. Using unit testing techniques they could obviously test the JavaScript functions behind their Angular controllers, but that didn’t help them assert that bindings were correct or that directives actually manipulated … Continue reading
Are Tech Tasks Useful Work?
A project I’m aware of recently started discussing in their retrospectives that they wanted to start assigning points to tech tasks. I’m a big believer in allowing a team to exercise control over its own process — so in my mind the right answer is to let the team make the call. I do have some thoughts … Continue reading
The Next Wave
The Current Wave JavaScript was the “Next Wave” maybe two years ago. JavaScript is in your database. JavaScript is on the server. JavaScript is on the client. JavaScript is in your network transport. JavaScript is in your lisp. JavaScript is testable. The Next Wave I think the next wave is something functional, probably Clojure, for … Continue reading
Organizational Risk: Building Trust
In my last post, talking about Organizational Risk, I advocated for a meeting once per iteration with members of different departments to reduce the kinds of project throughput risks that can stem from an dev team practicing agile working within a larger waterfall oriented organization. What might a meeting like this look like? Infrastructure & … Continue reading
Organizational Risk
Transforming an organization is a difficult business. One common pattern is the development team takes up the charge, practicing scrum and XP techniques. However, they may find their agile team working with a waterfall oriented Enterprise Architecture and Web Operations department. There’s an impedance mis-match here that can result in risk to your project, particularly … Continue reading
“Bring a Laptop, Will Code” Events
“Bring a Laptop, Will Code” Events I’ve always found events where you are expected to participate by coding the most interesting. You can see how your fellow developers think, possibly see other environments, and actually sharpen your skills. Often during the work day, developers have time pressures and business interests to factor in – this … Continue reading