Recently, I was reading some bits about Kanban system for Software Engineering. I thought “oh no… another Agile fancy word, which introduces hardly any value”. Well, after a few minutes of reading and thinking I must say one thing. Kanban is an Agile manifesto grasp in set of important principles. I must say, that it changed my way of thinking regarding Agile and how we have implemented it in our company.

We all know about it but there is always an issue how to explain it to a beginner, why static classes are just a no way to go. Of course, you as a software guru can directly point out at least 10 reasons why… “it is not testable”, “it is not object oriented coding”, “you make your code highly coupled”, and so on… Unfortunately, beginners accept them as “very smart reasons”, but they don’t fully understand them. How to explain why static classes are just pure evil?

Recently I have been working on quite a big website. From the very beginning I knew I would need data caching layer or something that will smartly do it. The simplest solution is just to check if something is in cache in my method code and take it from there. Well, but what if I have 100 methods? Should I call the same logic in all of them? This is only one method call, but still 100 times, makes me feel “this is not the smartest way to do it”. Fortunately I have found out a new approach to make my caching very robust and smart. It is called Aspect Oriented Programming. By using it I have reduced the amount of my code significantly.

Yesterday, on November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft  released a new version of Silverlight Beta 4. Truly, I am astonished by the amount of features they delivered this time. We are coming closer and closer to the moment when web applications will work like regular desktop versions without portability issues and others. I have listed ten of the most interesting new features.

Recently, I have been developing quite a big website using ASP.Net MVC Preview 2 framework. Itself it has several nice features but to build a high testable, loosely coupled application we need something more than we get. MvcContrib is a good source of a few nice ideas which can help you in testing, designing and developing your application.

A few days ago (6th of November) the third version of .Net SDK for Facebook was released. This release has major new features like Silverlight and ASP.MVC support. What this means to Silverlight community?  Below you will find my first impressions and remarks.

The October release of the Silverlight Toolkit introduces several nice controls, libraries and improvements. Some time ago I described how easy it is to implement drag & drop with Silverlight 3.0. When I noticed Tim Heuers post about the new features of drag & drop I thought “what more we can get?”…we can! Imagine that you have a list box with elements that you want to reorder simply by drag & drop. Before, this required some code behind but not anymore. Have a look!

Since the emergence of Microsoft Windows up to the Windows XP the users have been provided with backward compatibility features. Personally I think that this is one of the main reasons why Microsoft Windows is still on the market. It is because Windows never forced you to change all software in your computer to be able to work. Of course you can find several exceptions to  this, but in general, especially on Windows XP, we can run plenty of old applications. Supporting old software creates a very big overload on the operating system because it has to port old libraries keeping new ones as well. So how Microsoft plans to keep it for next decade?

The core function of each issue tracking system is to effectively manage tasks in projects. Unfortunately, defining issues in such a system can be a painful process. One task may hinder others  making the whole work plan more prone to all kinds of changes. If your team is working on more than one project, a proper tasks assignment without having the overview of all other projects is simply impossible. Due to that fact we have created our own schedule plugin, which is not just another calendar tool. We have combined it with an already existing tickets management system, and added a few improvements to make tasks creation and assignment easier than ever. Check this out!