Frans Bouma's blog

Next week, the MVP summit is again reality and I'm there . I'll arrive on Sunday and will leave on Thursday, and I'll hope I'll meet a lot of my fellow MVP friends and perhaps others who are in the neighborhood

Jeroen van den Bos started a very interesting series of articles about software maintenance and software maintainability, what it does with your architecture, how to evolve implemented systems to contain new functionality etc. etc. Below the links to the articles which are currently online, more will follow soon. Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I'm offered a free license for NDepend 2.0

Last week I had the privilege to spend 5 days in Arosa, Switzerland, among a group of people who were way more smarter than I am, for the annual Software Architecture Workshop (SAW). The SAW in Europe is an initiative of Jimmy Nilsson, and uses the Open Spaces methodology to let the participants discuss all kinds of topics during a set of parallel tracks. This year, the organization was done by Beat Schwegler of Microsoft. From the Netherlands, Paul Gielens, Arjen Poutsma (of Spring framework fame) and myself were present. The SAW is an invite only event.

I was unhappily surprised this morning when I compiled a new build of an assembly and changed the assembly file version attribute from 2.0.0.061005 to 2.0.0.070105: I got this wicked warning from the C# compiler:

warning CS1607: Assembly generation -- The version '2.0.0.070105' specified for the 'file version' is not in the normal 'major.minor.build.revision' format

First of all: Happy New Year!

Yesterday, Jeroen van den Bos showed me Sphere Online Judge (SPOJ), a site with almost 1200 (!) challenging programming problems / puzzles, and which allows you to upload a solution in sourcecode form and which is compiled and tested on the server. The site exists for over 2 years already and has over 2600 contestants trying to get to the top. That's right, for every puzzle you solve, you get points and the more points you get, the higher your ranking. .

So apparently some people got a free laptop which was payed by AMD and Microsoft. I say: good for them, getting gifts is always nice. (no, I didn't get one, nor would I have accepted it). However a gift from a company has a side effect: there's always a catch.