The Winter of NHibernate

It's been a long time coming but I'm going to increase my skillset and finally enter the world of NHibernate.

It’s been an itch that I’ve been meaning to scratch for sometime though I just have not had the motivation to do so.

I’ve just finished downloading all the vodcasts from the Summer of NHibernate website which is a wonderful introduction for the framework.

My first exposure to NHibernate was three years ago and got sidetracked learning an in-house development framework instead which was great though it didn’t do my resume any favours.

I’m looking forward to the convention over configuration practice and also how it manages relationships and mapping of my business objects to my database tables.

I’ll update my progress as I go along.

Is this OK Neil?

Twitter Vs Blogging

I need to focus more and more time on work right now so the blog will be in hibernation though I will be found at www.Twitter.com/DarrynParker

YAGNI

The first time I used Yagni on someone, I received (and rightfully so) a total blank look and wonder about my ability to speak Japanese.

Another work colleague overheard the conversation and had a chuckle and he knew exactly what I was talking about.

Yagni or, as it should be, Y.A.G.N.I. is an acronym of ‘You Ain’t Going To Need It’.

When introduced in a team, it can be a very useful, diplomatic and useful tool to express your opinion on certain functionality or effort that you don’t think will be implemented or have any real benefit to the end product.

I’ve used Yagni before in teams and after a while no-one really takes offense to it – it becomes part of the every increasing vocabulary. I’m found it more common in Scrum projects that others.

Screenshot Utility

I’ve been using ScreenShot32 (unsexiest name ever) for over 12 months now and cannot complain about it. Then a work colleague suggested an open source version called Greenshot.

It offers the same ability to sample screen shots and dump them to a printer of file system, though this one seems to be a bit more seamless and adds the ability to select a specific region on the screen and saving it to the file system as well as copying it to the clipboard.

I’ve been using it for a week now and am happy with the move so far.

Itchy Coding Finger

I’ve spent the last 6 weeks in design and requirements-land and have been enjoying the change of scenery from the average day of coding.

Though I’m starting to get an itchy coding finger and while I did expect that, I also know that’s when the biggest implementation/build mistakes are likely to occur.

The desire to start coding again can make for a fast trip to the land of thoughtlessness and stupid implementation decisions. So as long as I am aware of this I can be in control of my need to code for coding sake.

And I know that I am not alone in these thoughts. I have worked within development teams where no coding had been performed for two months and guys were almost suffering from withdraw symptoms and headed home to put in two-three hours of developing just to get a ‘hit’.

You would think that I was talking about some kind of addiction which maybe it is.

English vs American

I’m at the junction point again when I need to get comfortable again with my employer’s coding standards and guidelines.

Apart from my usual gripe against database column names like ‘ModifiedDate’ and ‘CreatedDate’ (I prefer ‘ModifiedOn’ and ‘CreatedOn’) all is good.

There is a often unwritten rule to write code using Australian English as opposed to United State English. And this extends to naming objects in the database following the en-au dictionary.

Is this a good thing? I’m not too sure about that. As this stage, I lean towards seeing code written in the same language that the depending framework is written in. As long as we’re talking about English here and not French, Japanese or Portuguese.

Coding and designing your datastore/base in Us English would prevent statements like the following creeping in.

var myColour = NewColorPicker.SelectedColor;

But what about commenting? Commenting I believe should be done in the native language of the developer / company as this has the potential to reach outside the code and into formal documentation.

ReSharper Vs GhostDoc

I have happily installed the Beta version of ReSharper 4.5 last week and it was running perfectly, it’s much faster and the options surrounding class member styling is impressive.

I installed GhostDoc on Thursday and all of a sudden my ReSharper popup helper windows opened on demand but closed 1/2 a second later. Intellisense was working fine and the test runner was OK as well. But I was not able to produce any code navigation windows via CTRL-N or CTRL-F12. The window appears and then dies after a split second.

I simply uninstalled GhostDoc and rebooted the machine (after installing some other OS updates) and everything was back to normal.

Has anyone else experienced this issue?

6 May 2009 - Update: I still have not found a fix for this. It was only I uninstalled GhostDoc, did ReSharper start working again.