Geoffrey Vandiest WebLog

This Blog has moved

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:41:25 +0200

This blog has moved!!!!!

MVC with ASP.NET

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:31:39 +0100

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Existe what's next?

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:39:13 +0100

Hello folks,We just released a new version of Exist .

This version contains a Gallery application. The Gallery enables users to post pictures on their profile. Other users can come to admire your pictures and rate them.

Next week we will launch a new feature: The Graph, through the graph visitors will be able to leave some comments on your profile.

During the month of November we plan to review some existing features like the widget. You will be able to put your Gallery onto your widget. Don’t hesitate to give us feedback about the existing features or to propose new ones.Stay tuned…

Web setup project walkthrough

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:14:27 +0200

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Subsonic

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:23:23 +0200

Have a look at subsonic!

Its a lightweight, open source ORM mapper for ASP.NET but its more than that!

Subsonic is an implementation of the "Active Record" pattern used in rails for the data mapping. It also tries to mimic some of the MVC concepts of rails.

Subsonic site: http://www.subsonicproject.com

Subsonic on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/subsonic

Introduction webcasts:

Subsonic intro:http://www.wekeroad.com/ss_setup2.html

MVC with subsonic:http://www.subsonicproject.com/view/soniccast-3---all-about-mvc.aspx

Agile & Finance

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:04:51 +0200

In this episode of the agile podcast Chriss Matts explains how he applied agile practices in financial managment. He also explains how certain agile concepts can be proven by mathematics and how agile could change the way you take decsisions in your personal life.

Model View Controler revisited

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 16:11:49 +0200

The Model View Controler is one if not the most used patterns in software engineering.

I just came along an article of Martin fowler GUI Architectures describing this pattern and his modern contra part the Model View Presenter. Everyone who is interested in patterns should read this article and (re)-discover the father of all patterns.

Ajax best practices

Wed, 23 May 2007 18:00:47 +0200

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The good, the bad and the ugly

Fri, 18 May 2007 16:20:40 +0200

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I Exist

Sat, 12 May 2007 11:42:46 +0200

My team has worked hard last months to develop the latest Skynet application: Exist!

This application is primarily a social networking site addressed to Belgians who want to aggregate not only all the digital content they create and/or are interested in, but also all the digital information they may have compulsed over the time, into one place. It is also an opportunity to reinforce the social networking dimension we offer through our products. The main features of the site are to search by tags in order to find interesting profiles and to aggregate content in order to share your centres of interest.

During all stages of the development lifecycle we used web 2.0. technologies and paradigms. Therefore, all the effort has been brought to implement a feed aggregator, clean and meaningful URL and provide a rich end user experience through the use of ajax. The most difficult was to be able to provide a rich user experience with ajax but at the same time guarantee that the site remain crawler friendly.

This application was build using the latest technologies of two worlds that most web developers consider as concurrent: PHP and .Net. For the presentation layer we used a mix of the Yahoo YUI control library and prototype and the server side code was written in PHP 5.2 using our portal framework: ATOM. For the backend we used WCF the latest Microsoft framework for building distributed applications. By combining these technologies we tried to use the best tools available from the enterprise and open source world.

Currently the application is online but not officially launched. So subscribe now exclusively and be one of the first on this new community.

Dutch version: http://exist.skynet.be

French version: http://existe.skynet.be

Bye.

Comparing ASP.NET with PHP

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:58:09 +0100

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End To End testing

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:15:36 +0100

I truly believe in TDD (Test driven development). Nevertheless I think that just TDD and refactoring dont imply that the developers are writing first time right code. TDD will only test the case the developer has thought of. Its a coding practice that is helping in improving the design but its not a guarantee for perfect quality.

On the project we are currently working on, weve planned some end to end testing sessions. Each testing sessions goal is to test a couple of stories. We hope that these tests will be helpful to better understand what our end-users really want. As we dont have a dedicated QA team the responsibility of the tests is handled by our usability team. They invited some end users for testing sessions. We already do a lot of tests but this is the first time we are organizing formal end to end tests during the development process.

Although the first testing session will be held tomorrow Ive the feeling that the investment we made by preparing these tests is already paying off. Usually a couple of weeks before the delivery date a lot of pressure are put on the head of the team. The sessions are motivating the team to deliver a complete set of features at regular moments in time. Because we organised these tests all over the development period weve divided the delivery of the product into small releases. The developers are therefore making regular sprints and this is improving our productivity and quality.

Knowing that the fearless end-users are coming to evaluate our product stimulates us to deliver more quality. It helped us discover bugs sooner because someone else that is not as close to the code check that the code is doing what he expects.

Web technology cocktail

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:20:20 +0100

Interoperability between PHP & .Net

In my team, we are currently testing a new type of architecture. We decided to mix technologies and uses PHP for the front-end of our application and WCF for the business tyre.

One advantage of PHP over .Net is that there are a lot more PHP developers available on the market and they are usually cheaper as their ASP.NET colleagues. Most of the developers working on the web started their career as webmasters. They learned programming on PHP because of the simplicity of the PHP language and the fact that Microsoft never made a product that was appealing to them. For most of this type of autodidacts its really hard to master an OO platform as ASP.NET of JSP. So in my opinion despite the fact that ASP.NET or JSP are far more advanced and proposes a better set of tools, PHP will remain for a long time the most used web platform. For the same reasons I predict that it will be very hard for Microsoft to sell his expression suite to webmasters.

The PHP language is very flexible and easy. The entering cost was really low, in a couple of days we where able to master the language. We found a very effective way of interoperate both technologies by using wsdl2php.

Nevertheless Im a bit disappointed over PHP because we are missing a good development environment. For the moment we are using Zend Studio and it really sucks. The auto completion is not working properly and we were unable to configure it for remote debugging or for source control. We use a distant development server because the application will be deployed on linux clusters and we wanted to have the same development environment as our deployment environment. Zend is really bad with this type of configuration.

Its like we are back to the stone age of development; no debugger, no source controller. Because of that we are forced to phone to all members of the team to know who is working on what. Our code is full of "echo" and "print_r" statements. Bugs appears because someone else has saved some new files on the server that are incompatible with the current version of the files.

PHP is a nice little platform but it really miss an IDE as VS.NET 2005 IDE and other tools that boost up productivity and quality.

MySpace or how to handle 40 Billion page views

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:28:23 +0100

An article about how the guys working for MySpace manage to handle 40 Billion page views a day!

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp

Web 2.0 or the self organizing web

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:30:40 +0100

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