Catching up

I was afraid that I would neglect this blog when I started it, and it appears I have done just that.  What can I say, I've been busy.  2 kid, changing jobs, multiple home improvement projects....  I'm back now, and just wanted to post some of what I've been doing.

The new job is going great by the way.  I'm still doing .NET development, but nowhere near the amount of SQL I did previously.  We have dedicated DB developers who handle all of the data modeling and stored proc writing.  I do miss it, but I'm happy to be able to devote more time to learning more about .NET.  Aside from that, I've been very pleased with how it's going.  My peers are talented and bring diverse skills with them, so more opportunity for me to learn from them.

Last week, they even put all of the web app team into training for MVC2.  I have nothing but the best opinion of Brock Allen and DevelopMentor.  I've taken about 6 training courses in the past that were geared towards developers, and all of them were lacking.  Either the instructor only knew the bare minimum to get you past a snag doing the excercises, or if they knew more, they were unwilling to share, citing scope of the course doesn't cover the question.  Brock, was very different.  Not only did he know the course material inside and out, he was able to answer questions about behaviors of the framework by citing the class and using reflector to back up his statements.  Additionally, he took the time to learn the source code of MVC2 and was able to walk us through pieces of the implimentation he felt we should know about or may want to extend.

The training also covered a couple other concepts I've been looking at for a while, dependency injection, inversion of control, unit testing and test driven design.  For about 2 years, off and on, I've been struggling with trying to consistently impliment unit testing.  Again, I was impressed with Brock, not only was he able to cite specific, concrete examples of how he solved the issues i've struggled with in the past, but he even pointed me to several blog posts that went further into detail with my exact issues.  Jason Diamond's blog was one of them.  He also showed us Osherove's blog, and recommended we do his TDD Kata frequently.

I'll be working on my Kata, and will let you know how it goes.