I just had a student from a local high school job shadow me for about an hour or so. Overall, I think I left him with a very good impression on what development work is really like - well, in the sense that I spend some of my mornings doing bug fixes. I was able to show him how to diagnose & fix 2 different applications, 1 of which was alerted to me while we were working on the first application. However, I feel like I might have lost him at parts, because he hasn't done much programming himself, and has only really used BASIC (eek!) and HTML (ahhhh). I did ask him if he was lost at any point, and he said that for the most part he understood what I was doing. I guess thats a good thing, since he wants to become a game developer himself.

Job shadowing is fun, really it is. Well, if you're the person being shadowed that is. I remember when I did job shadowing in high school...I was so lost and my head was filled with so much information that I was just spent after those days. Plus, I never really did any programming job shadowing - so I really didn't get full exposure to what I would be dealing with daily, but I can say I was not dissapointed.

Have you done job shadowing/been shadowed? What were your experiences like?

Well, I think I should join the crowd and say I just received my free nTierGen license from Gavin.

The tool looks very well put together, however within 5-10 minutes of playing with it, I've already submitted 2 bugs. I doubt that will continue for the rest of my testing, but I do like how he integrates creating a remoting layer - very sweet.

However, sometimes I don't want to use tables as datasources or have it create stored procedures because they're commonly created by a guy at work for us, and they generally need to be a bit more complex than the simple insert, update, and delete procs. Maybe a nice addition would be to select created stored procedures as well and then create DAL/BLL layer objects off of that? I guess I'll post that to the forum as well.

Anyway, if you have a blog on weblogs.asp.net, you too can get a free version just by shooting Gavin an email with your blog address. Simple, easy, and FREE!

So heres an interesting question - I've been using this weblog for quite some time now, and I just realized that I don't really know what "Agg Views" are. Now - before you go off your high horse, I know that they refer to RSS subscriptions in Aggregators (I'm not a moron), but my real question is, how is this stat collected? Is it based on RSS subscriptions to only my feed, or does that include the main feed subscribers as well? Anyone care to enlighten me?

Update: Scott and James expalined it very well. Thanks guys!

Ahh, so I haven't blogged since last Thursday...guess I've just been too busy lately. Anyway...

Why is it that some people just don't take certifications seriously. I realize that this topic has been covered time and time again, but it still floors me when I see a newsgroup post that says "just quickly read the exam cram 2 book and study the trancenders." This all stemmed from someone asking what else he should do to prepare himself for passing 70-300, in which he has really no .NET experience. I can say that I was the first to respond to him saying that he needed to spend some time with .NET to be comfortable with it, and then work on passing 70-305/315 and 70-306/316 prior to taking 70-300 (from what he said after failing it 1 time before, that most of it relates to debugging and other stuff).

Now, I personally haven't taken 70-300 yet, but will be in the near future, so I can't really speak on what exactly he needs. However, having a base knowledge in .NET will be a positive and helpful thing for any test relating to the .NET certifications.

This just brings me to my next point on why people are getting certifications just to get certifications and passing them using only trancenders, brain dumps, etc. Most of the people that fall into this category, I feel, have had very little .NET exposure, and retain about 0.5% of what they crammed into their head in 1 week. To me, this just kills the idea of certified professionals knowing the technology. I feel that significant time must be spent on the appropriate technology, by reading books, reading online articles, getting your hands dirty in examples & real world cases, and taking practice exams, are all the best methods to ensuring that those who take and pass these certifications actually know about the technology and how to implement it if the time came.

To me, by shortcutting your way into certification just so you can stick it on your resume is completely destroying the idealism of certifications. Now - the real question, is how do those being tested actually prove they know the information rather than just regurgitating it for an exam. In reality, there isn't, I just hope that my employer and possible future employers test my skills that my certifications show before making any presumptions on my skill level. I've heard around the grapevine that some employers are starting to not even look at those with certifications because of the plaguing problem of those trying to beat the system. So why bother? What are your thoughts?

So Bill won, hmph. I wanted Kwame to win, but oh well. I'm in the middle of commercials, so I'm not sure what job Bill's going to take, but I would take the Golf Course job. I've lived in IL all my life, and it would be awesome to be out on the west coast.

Update: So Chicago it is for Bill. Makes sense considering its his hometown, and why move across the US. Good choice! BTW - that Crossfire is a pretty sweet car, though I'd rather have a Corvette.

I've been fighting this problem for quite some time now...whenever I was using IE or other applications where screens would refresh - and I would use my scroll wheel - the page would refresh, and sometimes go backwards and forwards. It was a very erratic and annoying behavior, but I finally figured out the culprit.

Twas' the Intelli Point 5, and all through the computer, not a creature was stirring, not even my mouse.

So yeah - I uninstalled Intelli Point 5, and voila, my problems solved. Man, their Intelli Point 5 is super buggy. I wish I had 4.2 to go back to, I heard that was a great version.

As a followup to my previous post on gathering research information, I wanted to share the findings with everyone in case they're put in the same situation I (and another co-worker) was. Thanks to the strong efforts of my co-worker, we were able to produce good measurements of TDD effects.

Advantages of TDD:

• 87.5% of developers reported better requirements understanding.
• 95.8% of developers reported reduced debugging efforts.
• 78% of developers reported TDD improved overall productivity.
• 50% of developers found that it decreased overall development time.
• 92% of developers felt that TDD yielded high-quality code.
• 79% of developers believed TDD promoted simpler design.

The aggregate score of these findings shows that 80% of developers found TDD to be effective. Also, there was an increase in code quality which passed 18% more functional black-box tests.

Challenges of TDD:

• 40% of developers found adoption of TDD was difficult.
• 16% increase in development time of projets.

These results were of a survey done, and not scientific facts. It proved difficult to find statistics on TDD due to the "new" nature and adoption of TDD in the IT arena, which is why our results were based on surveys that were found across the internet.

References:

1. Elfriede, D. "Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve your Testing"
2. Beck, K. "Test-Driven Development"
3. E. Michael Maximilien, "Assessing Test-Driven Development at IBM" Found Here.
4. George, B. and Williams, L., "An Initial Investigation of Test-Driven Development in Industry" Found Here.
5. "An Evaluation of Test-First in University Environment" Found Here.

Update: Some confusion about where we retrieved this numbers has come about. Our company did not do this survey, it was retrieved from one of the references stated in this article. I will talk with my co-worker, who found the survey, to give me specifics on which resource it was found at.

Update 2: After talking with my co-worker, she stated that the information I quoted above comes from the PDF found in reference #4. This was a study done over in Germany.

I'm trying to shift my division at work into using TDD. Everyone seems to be in favor of it, however they're wanting some quantitative measurements via Case Studies or White Papers that will show over time or over a project that TDD decreases bugs and increases developer productivity. Does anyone know of any references that are available online that I can point them to?

BlogJet has released v1.0.0.17 BETA. Get it now!

BlogJet 1.0.0.17 Beta Release Notes
April 13, 2004

FEATURES
* XHTML compatibility.
* Improved speed of receiving post for editing (Blogware).

BUG FIXES
* Fixed issue with categories.
* Access violation at address 0041CF29.
* Fixed error in version checker.
* Minor bug fixes.

I'm sitting here at work building an application using TDD (which by itself is another post, and may be coming later), and every time I start a new class for another piece of the puzzle, I'm hating on how I have put the keyword "sealed" class in my declaration. Now, this isn't a major issue, but it can be if you plan on releasing an API for customers to build against. What's my issue? Well, I'm wondering if the "sealed" and "notinheritable" keywords should be applied by default in Whidbey.

My proposition comes from the fact that it is good design practice to have your classes become "sealed" or "not inheritable", that way your users cannot accidently inherit and break changes with your API. In practice this is a big deal, and how often are you building an API, and you become lazy to allow the default attributes/keywords/accessors be applied to a API (classes specifically, making them public instead of private or internal/friend)? I'm almost betting very frequently.

I propose that in Whidbey, and future versions, that "sealed" or "not inheritable" be applied by default to all new class declarations created by the IDE. This way, you have to make an effort and think about what you're doing when removing this keyword, and hopefully make you think if you really need to do so. 

As of right now, I realize that this can be accomplished by editing the templates used somwhere deep within the directory structure of VS.NET, so please don't tell me I can do this now. What are you're thoughts, feelings, objections to this?