The Mint
You did what to your IOC?
If you are unsure what an IOC container is or why you would use one you may want to skip this post. If you don’t know what it is but have heard the term and wish to learn more, well this still isn’t the post for you. This post is covering StructureMap, a popular IOC container and how to use it. This post is not an introduction to dependency injection.
The recent release of preview screen shots for the next version of Visual Studio sparked a lot of debate among the developer community. I have heard a lot of criticism regarding the new design and color palette and how it feels like a step backwards. I am still on the fence (given that you can adjust the color theme) but I can appreciate what people are saying. For easy comparison I’ve gathered screen shots showing the many faces of Visual Studio going back to 1997.
I’m in the process of getting my new MacBook Air setup. This involves editing my bash profile, setting system preferences, installing my favorite apps and getting the system ready for development. It used to take days to get a new Mac completely setup. I was able to get this new Air completely setup within a few hours. Homebrew makes it incredibly simple to install the needed tools. About the only thing I don’t use it for is to install Ruby and Rails. For this you’ll need to do a little system setup.
After years of using WebForms I decided to venture out and see what other frameworks exist. I didn’t really have any expectations or requirements. I was simply curious what others were using and interested in what’s different (perhaps better) about them. In my search I stumbled across a light-weight web framework known as CodeIgniter.
As the result of a rather insulting discussion with an anti-VB coworker I challenge myself to jump the fence from VB to C# land. I wanted to experience first hand what all the fuss was about. So I dove head-first into building my first C# project. That was nearly four months ago.
Today I went to lunch with Brian, our resident Business Analyst who serves as the link between development and operations. (A policy prevents developers from talking directly with users. Instead we play the telephone game and hope it comes out correct on the other end.) We had a nice long chat over some delicious Sonny’s BBQ. I ranted about corporate policy and complained about our development process. Little did I know that I would return from lunch to find a new policy in place. A policy that I’d feel so strongly against that it makes my other complaints seem petty.
I have been enjoying life at my new company for over a month now. The single biggest difference between all my previous employers is the size of this company. They have nearly 500 employees and four buildings (including the 18.5K sqft building I work in). In fact they have more programmers here than my previous company had employees. Keeping good communication and organization between this many people is a challenge. To that end (at least for the development department) they have introduced a mandated, daily stand-up meeting: the daily scrum.
My new company is your typical enterprise business. They had an in-house application created with Microsoft Access. As the company grew the Access app couldn’t keep up and the need to rewrite the software became obvious. After some false starts in Access they finally settled on VB.NET as the new language of choice. All this occurred a few years prior to my arrival.
