Agile Trade-offs

It was very refreshing to read Paul Dolman-Darrall’s article about the trade-offs to adopt in an agile delivery model.

Agile is more than 10 years old but still have whimsical attributes of a brand new artefact.  I believe this isn’t unique to agile but tend to be the case for any delivery methodology.  It seems that however how...

Entity Framework with Asynchronous behaviours

They finally did it:  the future release of Entity Framework (version 6) will sport asynchronous behaviour based on .NET 4.0 Task Parallel Library (TPL).

The API is pretty neat.  First the SaveChanges gets an async brother SaveChangesAsync returning a Task.  So we can now write things like:

await context.SavesChangesAsync();

The more complicated topic is the queries. ...

Unit Testing SharePoint

Doing automated unit tests in SharePoint isn’t easy.

As with all libraries that haven’t been designed with unit testing in mind, SharePoint object model doesn’t expose its dependencies:  it connects to a Content Database given the context creating it and there are no ways to redirect it to some stub implementations.

That is unless you can override method invocations.  This...

Windows Azure SQL Database named an Enterprise Cloud Database Leader by Forrester Research

Three weeks ago Forrester released a paper on Cloud Databases.

As pointed out by Microsoft, Forrester declared SQL Azure and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB and salesforce.com’s Database.com as leader of the pack.

That is quite impressive given the relatively late start Microsoft took on those competitors.

SQL Azure is a leading service in the...

Web Design: Make Complex thing Simple

I’m always amazed at you a simple user interface can simplify complex tasks.

Take Windows Explorer where you can drag & drop multiple files from one folder to another.  The user sees which folders the files are going into, it takes a few seconds and boom!  Doing that by command line would be much more abstract, left alone much more...