After some time blogging at Clearscreen I've decided to stop writing (and not writing) here and,  following the current trend, start a new adventure on my own at www.josefcobonnin.com.

I would like to think the new Mad about .NET will be a much more interesting place where I will not repeat some of the mistakes done here, unfortunately the blogger will be the same, therefore I guess I will need to continue learning along the way :)

I want to thank Clearscreen and Miguel Jimenez for his support and patience during my time here.

Regards,

Jose.

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I've always been interested on writing a video game. With the new XNA tools, I think the time has come.

ASP/VB.NET is the only language I've used for the last 5 years. As many of you, I've read and heard lots of great things on C#, and I've even done some small things with it, but nothing that went on production.

I'll try to keep the blog updated on the most interesting parts of this trip.

Wish me luck! ;-)

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I'm relatively new to Team Foundation Server, and I'm discovering a lot of community projects than are very useful for me a for my team when developing using TFS.

One of the things I read about was the Checking Policies. In one of the last events we had in the Madrid .Net User Group, Luis Fraile (MVP Team System), talked us about VSTS extensibility, but I don't have enough experince with this environment to create my own policies.

One thing I consider very important is that all code that are in the repository are commented out and browsing CodePlex I found CCCP ( TFS Code Comment Checking Policy). It's a tiny application that installs smoothly and that allow the TFS Admin to add a policy that checks if the code is commented when a TFS User is checking-in some changes to the repository. It works for C# and VB and allow the administrator to select what items are going to be checked: class, methods, properties or by accessor: public, private or protected.

I'm still testing it but it's a very good approach to ensure that all code of the repository has comments.

I've been a lot of time without writing here. I'm specially busy with other issues than blogging but this time is an special time. I'm proud to annouce the next session of the Madrid .Net User Group.

We'll explore some common problems in software development and their consecuences with some examples. And then we'll continue with five basic design rules in software development.

Event details:

Event Name: Retaking control, Agile Design Principles (Translated from Spanish title)
Speaker: León Welicki
Where: Microsoft Iberica Offices (Madrid)
When: November 15th from 19:00PM to 21:00PM
Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359440&Culture=es-ES

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Windows Home Server was released to manufacture a couple weeks ago. I haven't even done an article on my RC1 experiences and it has been RTM already. I know I'm late. I even took some screenshots of the settings page that I wanted to post here, so I wasn't that late!

My experiences? It's an amazing product, and I'm going to buy it as soon as I can get it.

Well, I love forgetting about backups. Now I know (and I can check whenever I want) that I have a backup of all my home computers. I can access my files when I'm out of my house. I love that when you want to download a folder, it compresses it on a zip file so you can download it easily.

I will also install it on my father's office. There are only three computers at his office, and a Windows Server 2003 is too much. This is easier to manage (just install the client CD on each computer), easier to maintain (storage problems? just add another one, you'll see just one data drive) and I'm almost sure that it will be cheaper than WS2003. 200€, anyone?

There's just one thing that I didn't like about it. Probably it's me and the lack of research that I did. Anyway, I'm explaining it. When I installed it, I wanted the first drive to be the OS drive, but I couldn't. WHS automatically made a 20GB partition for the OS, and the rest for data. Maybe that was because I just plugged in the first drive. If I have a second drive while installing, will I be able to choose that I want the first one as a OS-only drive? I was thinking on getting two 80GB drives and set them up in RAID 1 so I minimize the possibilities of losing the WHS installation.

Will you use WHS? I want to know why! (whatever your answer is).

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OOP criticism and OOP problems
The emperor has no clothes!
Reality Check 101
Snake OOil

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm

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I've been accepted on the Windows Home Server RC1 test. That's very exciting to me because I think the product is great. When it was announced I was just thinking "I want that!!".

I was going to test it on a spare computer, but the motherboard just broke so I bought a new computer. It will run the final version of WHS, so I bought a nice computer. Almost every component is on the lower-end side, but I bought a some nice things. (3x500Gb hard drives).

WHS is now installed on the machine and I'll do a manual backup of my main machine after finishing this post. I'll be posting my experiences with it. Anyway, I'll see if I'm allowed to post pictures and if there are certain parts of it that I can't talk about. I think there was no limit about that in the beta program, but I want to be sure first.

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The Lazy Load Pattern is a very simple and useful pattern. This pattern is usually used when a property of an object is not always accessed during the usage of the object instance. For example, image that you have a Customer object. This object has a property that contains a collection of all orders placed by the customer. In the UI you have a general view of the customer object where you only show it name and surname. For this view of the customer object you don't use the Ordes property, so it can be loaded only when neccesary, for example in a detailed view of the customer object.



In a classical implementation of the Customer class, the Orders property use to be as follow, and is filled in the business layer when the instance of the Customer class is created.

class Customer
{
    #region Private members

    private int m_id;
    private string m_name;
    private string m_surname;
    private OrdersCollection m_orders;

    #endregion

    #region Public properties

    public int Id
    {
        get { return m_id; }
        set { m_id = value; }
    }

    public string Name
    {
        get { return m_name; }
        set { m_name = value; }
    }

    public string Surname
    {
        get { return m_surname; }
        set { m_surname = value; }
    }

    public OrdersCollection Orders
    {
        get { return m_orders; }
        set { m_orders = value; }
    }

    #endregion
}

A better performace approach is to defer the loading of the Orders property to the moment that it's accessed. If the property is accessed and the private member is null means that the property has not been initialized so you can load it value in that moment.

public OrdersCollection GetOrders()
{
    return new OrdersCollection(this.m_id);
}

I know that in the last months I haven't posted anything here, but the post of the other day. If you read the title of this post I'm sure that you're thinking that there's a mistake, but this is what I want to write "ilitialize()"

Today I've started working for ilitia technologies and I'm very happy. Some of the bloggers of clearscreen.com already belongs to it, and very happy to join the team. For those who didn't know about ilitia, it's a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner company based in Madrid (Spain). They usually use to collaborate in community events with Microsoft Iberica, what means that there are people with high technical level. I hope to learn a lot.

At the moment I don't have much more to say, I'll write more soon. I'm doing a personal project that I don't know if it will be useful but I'm sure it will be funny.

Doolwind's Game Coding Site is riding a Programmer Personality Test. This test is based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and has been modified to relate to your programmer personality type. It's a 12 question test so it's easy to fill out.

It says that I'm a DLTB (Doer, Low Level, Team, liBeral) programmer type.

What kind of programmer are you?

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Just about to leave to Las Vegas for the MIX'07 and with a chance in my hand to interview Scott Guthrie, I would like to apply the concept of the TV Show with the same title as this post, mostly known in Spain, where a set of citizens asks different questions to their government president.

Well, my idea is as follow, I would like to extend my interview with questions from all over the world and all kind of readers. So, do you have any interesting question to ask Scott Gu? feel curious about anything technical or professional about him?

If you are on the YES side, don't hesitate to write them at the end of this posts. Use the comments section, and I'll  manage to include them within my interview (as far as they are policatlly correct)

Thanks all, and see you in Vegas!

This Friday is the 5th anniversary of my company. For such important milestone the company has organized an special event in Amsterdam where all employees have been invited.

The event looks quite promising, paint ball war to release some of the stress accumulated, barbeque, dinner at a fancy restaurant, texas poker night and then to finish the night we go to the Revolutie party. Here is the full program if you are curious http://www.payvision.com/html/5yearmailing/5year.htm

It will be great ... see all the colleagues I don't see from long time ago, meet again some friends from when I was living there ... it will be a very long long night ... I mean Amsterdam is Amsterdam.

We have already opened the registration for the next event of Baleares on .NET.

This time the subject of the event we will be the fundamentals of Windows Communication Foundation.

I hope we have the same affluence of people as we had in the last event.