Author Archives:

Alt.Net Evangelism And What We Could Do Better

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

If we assume our goal as the Alt.Net community is to improve software development as a whole, we’re doing a pretty bad job.  Not that many people have even heard of the concepts we espouse, and those that have but … Continue reading →

Posted in alt.net | 18 Comments

Playing With Haskell

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

My tech book club is starting to look at Haskell. I’m as big of a language addict as anyone so I wanted to dive in early and this is the overview of what I’ve found so far Statically Typed But … Continue reading →

Posted in Functional, GHC, Haskell, Learning | Comments Off

Simple BDD/TDD

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

Todays theory is most tests and specs should be very short (2-3 lines), have at most a setup for context establishment, avoid the majority of test framework features as they should be used as an exception and not as a … Continue reading →

Posted in BDD, TDD | 10 Comments

Dynamic Loading of .Net Assemblies

Posted on August 31, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

Problem: You have dependencies which can be in a number of directories outside of the directory your app is running in. DotNet AppDomains are heavy to say the least and very high in ceremony.  You do not want to deal … Continue reading →

Posted in AppDomain, DotNet, Hate | 4 Comments

Focused and Narrow; Superficial and Broad

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

In my 20′s I got exposed to a large variety of work situations and was able to succeed in a variety of technical fields (admin, developer, hardware tech, etc). I had the time back then to not have to choose … Continue reading →

Posted in Learning | Comments Off

“Hero Mode Refactoring” AKA Enemy Of Brown Field Development

Posted on August 14, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

What do I mean by “Hero Mode Refactoring”?  We’ve all worked with code that wasn’t easily made testable. Most of the time we see a big ball of mud and have no idea where to begin. Sometimes however we have … Continue reading →

Posted in BDD, Brownfield, TDD | 4 Comments

Introducing SpecMaker “Rspec style” BDD in C#

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

So I’m certain this will be met with mixed response, because really .Net already has several decent BDD frameworks and many of you will chastise me for adding yet another framework when really BDD has nothing to do with what … Continue reading →

Posted in BDD, C#, Context, Spec, SpecMaker | 13 Comments

Windsor style convention over configuration in StructureMap

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

So I was trying to get my  BDD project SpecMaker working on Mono only to find out  my usual IoC container of choice Castle Windsor does not play nice.  StructureMap I’ve heard plays nice in Mono, and I know a … Continue reading →

Posted in Castle, Spec, SpecMaker, StructureMap | 3 Comments

Discussion: Mentoring, Knowledge Transfer and Different Styles Of Learning

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

I’ve been very fortunate that for most of my adult life, even before I got into tech I’ve been “the boss”, and had gobs of mentoring opportunities. I enjoy it and more importantly I know I will have a greater … Continue reading →

Posted in Learning | 2 Comments

Lessons From My First Attempt At Bringing Agile Into A Non-Agile shop.

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Ryan Svihla

Since I’m moving on from my current employer I figure now is a great time to share my post-mortem of my time there, specifically what worked, what didn’t and what did I learn. Iterations Of Any Length We tried 3 … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile, Lean | 13 Comments