Mastering Git takes you deep into Git to give you the working knowledge you need to confidently use this system. Git is an amazing source control system and will change the way you work - we've devoted over 3 hours and hopefully you'll agree that Git's rockin.

I'm (trying to be) a part of the Subsonic ORM team, who are putting the finishing touches on version 3.0.04 (lots of bug fixes).

Subsonic is on GitHub and can be found here: http://github.com/subsonic/SubSonic-3.0

So far, I haven't been much help. I managed to create my own fork, fix a couple unit tests, and submit a pull request.

But it was slow going, so I figured I'd better go get some JIT learning. Fortunately, Subsonic creator Rob Conery has launched TekPub, an on-demand screencast library where you can go get what you need, when you need it.

The Mastering Git series has been really helpful getting me up the learning curve. Rob has a teaching style that is both effective and enjoyable.

The preview is free, and the entire series is reasonably priced at $20 for over three hours of training.

If you're going to be spinning up on a project where Git will be used and you're a Subversion/VSS/PVCS/no VCS person, do yourself a favor and check this series out.

Software Project Management
Git and Subversion Hosting

Helping you and your team do things right.

Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.

We know that you don't have time to get a server up and running and then configure and secure code repositories, ticketing systems and valuable project management tools.

Tickets	Subversion Hosting	Dashboard
Create, assign and track bugs, feature requests, and more.	Create unlimited Git and Subversion repositories.	Get a quick overview of your entire project.

A friend and I are working on a little Silverlight magic and we wanted some source control and project management hosting. He remembered something he'd used in the past, and after IMing with a friend, he was reminded that it was Unfuddle.com.

Unfuddle offers both source control and project management in one brilliant package. There are various pricing plans, from free to spendy. It's kind of like Basecamp and SVNDude rolled into one.

Once you sign up and create your project, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, iCal feed, and email notifications.

There is also a basic but serviceable milestone and ticketing system you can use as a sort of Kanban board.

If you need something that's quick to set up and super-affordable, check out Unfuddle.com!

Instapaper

A simple tool to save web pages for reading later.

A friend and I have been trading a lot of web page links on social gaming. He had to jump on a plane and would have loved to have them available during the flight so he could catch up.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a good solution for that then, but now we have Instapaper. Set up an account and you can save web pages for reading later.

You can save pages in your browser using a "Read Later" bookmarklet. Even better, you can send blog articles to Instapaper using the "Send To" integration feature.

Best of all, there is an iPhone app that lets you sync your saved web pages to your phone and you can read them whenever you like.

I think the only feature I'd like to see is the ability to share items with other users.

Check it out!

 

IndooGrid 2.5

 

Next generation of data-driven module to present and manage contents. Build cutting edge website (including reports, forms, listings, catalogs etc.) in minutes or explore over 100 options to play with database. Allow users to view or edit any data table (make new one if you wish) in five simple steps without programming knowledge - or use in-depth options to make complex custom application if you’re expert.

I'm helping a friend with his early-stage startup, and they're using Indoo Grid 2.5 from IndooLab.com. This is an extension to DotNetNuke that let's you build relatively complex CRUD-style applications without any server-side coding.

I've used Indoo Grid on a couple projects and recommend it if you need to build prototypes, proofs-of-concepts or even production-ready applications inside of DotNetNuke.

Here are a few links to explore if you're curious:

Here's the site of the company that makes Indoo Grid:
http://www.indoolab.com/

Quick Starts are here:
http://www.indoolab.com/HelpTutorials/QuickStart/tabid/247/Default.aspx

Download Page (including User Guide, which I recommend):
http://www.indoolab.com/Downloads/tabid/166/Default.aspx

Download the documentation here:
http://www.indoolab.com/IndooGrid/Productdocumentation/tabid/224/Default.aspx

Forums:
http://www.indoolab.com/OnlineHelp/Forum/tabid/165/forumid/5/scope/threads/Default.aspx

• Interestingly, I’m less interested in following some of the practices I would if writing a production application. This means I’m not worrying too much about refactoring or testing until I get the basics down. I don’t want to confuse the concerns of exploration and learning with verifying the system works (which I can barely get going right now). When I am more confident in my knowledge, I’ll definitely spend more time thinking about these things.

The subject was "Starting iPhone development" but I thought the observation above was worth commenting on.

Personally, if I can, I prefer to explore new technologies (or new features of existing ones) with test-driven development.

I find that this documents my learning so that I don't forget or mis-remember anything I have discovered.

I can even refactor that learning as I move to higher levels of grokking the subject matter.

I can even mark tests as Ignored while I am figuring out how the technology or feature supports (or doesn't support) something.

I can send my tests to someone more advanced than I am, and ask them to comment on how I am progressing.

Finally, I can share my tests with others who follow.

I think exploratory TDD is something more people should do more often.

What do you think?

At the Agile Specification, BDD and Testing Exchange last month in London, Dan North spoke about selling behaviour driven development to the business. He put forward a relatively controversial idea on estimation: treat all stories as equal. Estimate each story as size 1 and just be done with it. Although this idea might seem overly simplistic, I find it really appealing.

On my current software project, we find this concept more than appealing - we find it works!

Every story starts out life as a 1-point story and should be able to be turned around in 8 hours from start of specification to customer acceptance.

If it turns out the story took more time, we run a quick post-mortem to find out why and then add a new rule to one of our "yardstick" documents (we have one for specification, one for development, one for testing). Now we have a better yardstick (get it?) for analyzing and possibly rejecting a story.

Yardstick documents can also have quality concerns in them as well in order to deal with "weak" stories that are certainly 1-point or less, but produce poor results. An example of this is a story with no behaviorial tests other than a "happy path" specified. This can certainly be turned around in time, but the results are likely to be bad.

Combining the best features of document databases, key-value stores, and RDBMSes.

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Written in C++, MongoDB features:

• Document-oriented storage (the simplicity and power of JSON-like data schemas)
• Dynamic queries
• Full index support, extending to inner-objects and embedded arrays
• Query profiling
• Fast, in-place updates
• Efficient storage of binary data large objects (e.g. photos and videos)
• Replication and fail-over support
• Auto-sharding for cloud-level scalability
• MapReduce for complex aggregation
• Commercial Support, Hosting, and Consulting

MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide structured schemas and powerful queries).

On my drive home from a meeting yesterday, I listened to episode #507 of .Net Rocks! where Carl and Richard interviewed Michael Dirolf from 10gen, the creators of open-source database MongoDB.

I think there is a lot of potential in this technology, especially for agile teams. MongoDB is schema-free, so it would seem that you no longer have to spend time worrying about database schema migrations.

Here are the resources I've gathered on MongoDB:

MongoDB site:
http://www.mongodb.org/

The .Net Rocks Show
http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=507

A webinar presented by Dwight Merriman from 10gen:
http://vivu.tv/portal/archive.jsp?flow=527-472-7945&id=1256920226675

C# Driver for Mongo (including partial Linq implementation)
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Drivers

Experimenting with MongoDB from C# (K. Scott Allen)
http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2009/10/13/experimenting-with-mongodb-from-c.aspx

Using MongoDB from C#(The Dynamic Programmer)
http://blog.dynamicprogrammer.com/2009/11/10/UsingMongoDBFromC.aspx

Source code:
http://github.com/samus/mongodb-csharp/tree/master

The article from The Dynamic Programmer includes an example of deserializing collection data into entities - something I was thinking about as I'm a big fan of IntelliSense and learning about problems at compile rather than run time.

Check out MongoDB!

12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee, 1 iPhone App

David Quinlan is a normal guy with day job and just a bit of coding experience. But he and a friend lived the dream and cranked out a simple iPhone app in a weekend. Here's how they did it:

This is a really inspirational story showing how it's possible to not only write a complete iPhone app in part of a weekend, but get it approved for the App Store in two days!

Some of the more interesting bits:

1. The guys chose a very simple concept - something they could get done in a weekend given that they had to learn how to do some parts of the coding that needed to get done. They had a short list of "must have" features and everything else was pushed off to future versions (if any).

2. Great division of labor. One guy broke off to put together the App Store submission data while the other guy cranked out code.

3. Testing was a breeze - the app is a study in Zen product ownership and really only does one thing, but does it well.

4. Perfect illustration of YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) in action - instead of hooking in a database to store the card texts, they used application settings memory that was easy to use and essentially free from an effort perspective.

All in all, quite the agile weekend project!