Visual Studio Light Switch

As is typical for me I went to MSDN and saw a quick blurb about Visual Studio Light Switch. I had never heard of it before and so was interested to see what it was all about. Basically, it is a new platform for easily and quickly creating professional-quality business applications for the desktop, the web, and the cloud. I think it looks to be absolutely amazing! I'm not sure where they are going with it but I could definitely see Light Switch being a much more powerful (and much more professional-looking) replacement for ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

I have used Dynamic Data several times and have found it to be invaluable. That being said, it doesn't offer some of the integration with SharePoint and Office. Additionally, the look and feel of the Light Switch apps is really outstanding. Plus, you can use your Light Switch app on the web or on the desktop! That's just awesome!

If you haven't seen anything on Light Switch check out the website and click on "Watch Videos about Light Switch".

I really suggest watching the keynote video (50+ minutes) if you want to see some really powerful stuff!

Asshole Driven Development

Shai Raiten had a great blog post about A-s-shole Development.

"Driven development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway."

I've worked with people like this before and almost fell out of my seat laughing when I saw this!

Generics and casting

I often find myself creating methods which return a generic type.  For instance, on a recent project I have been dealing with a lot of XML.  Instead of casting the value of an XAtrribute to an int or a decimal in a bunch of places in my code I created an extension method which will handle the dirty work.





This pattern is something I find myself coming back to constantly.  Hopefully you'll find some use for it.

Different types of coupling

A co-worker of mine (the one and only Dan Robinson) sent around an email to our team talking about different types of coupling between systems.  I'll post the bullet points here:

• Afferent – who calls this system?  A system with high afferent coupling is hard to replace
• Efferent – who does this system call?  A system with high efferent coupling has a lot of dependencies
• Platform – do both systems have to be on the same platform?  Levels of interoperability…
• Spatial – how much do systems know about each other’s location?  If the topology changes, do things break?
• Temporal – how much do things wait for each other?  If one system slows down, how are other systems affected?

I know this is a quick post but I feel better knowing that I got it out there.  I don't know about you but this is one I will keep coming back to.