Episode 15: Chris Tavares on Unity, P&P, Rotor, MVC, and EntLib
We took some time to talk to Chris Tavares of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group. We cover a lot of ground, everything from his work on adding reference counting to Rotot to his current work with the ASP.NET MVC team and on Unity.
Chris is smart. Scary smart. Every time I’ve heard him talk I’ve learned something. I may have to ask questions about 80% of what he’s said, but eventually the learning sinks into my brain. He gave us a great explanation of the differences between MVP, MVC, and the Passive View patterns.
Herding Code #13 is up - Back to Basics(But which ones). What are the basics of software development? We’ve seen a lot of blogs and heard some podcasts talking about getting back to the basics of software development and we all wondered, “What are the basics?” Are linked lists considered basic knowledge? Or are design patterns now required knowledge?
Twitter / Nate Kohari: D&D demos hurt the industry…: “”
Nate made a great point on Twitter the other day.
D&D (ed. note D&D = “Drag and Drop”) demos hurt the industry-at-large, because they blow smoke up the asses of non-technical people, and convince them this stuff is easy.
I agree with this statement. People generally come in two flavors when it comes to dealing with computers. Flavor one thinks that everything is hard, flavor two thinks that everything should be easy for the programmer to fix.
But should our industry strive to make drag and drop development a standard? Ensure that D&D generated code is easier to maintain and understand? Ensure that the code generators don’t overwrite out changes? We talk about trying to hit the 80% use case, can we use some kind of visual development to hit that mythical 80% case in development?
Agile BUG - the Agile Beer Users Group: “”
My buddy John Boal has started to organize an Agile Beer Night. The first one is August 21st at the Owl and Thistle pub in Seattle. It looks like the first one will include some discussion and demos surrounding some testing automation tools.