Tobler.SoftwareArchitecture()
John Tobler's somewhat ordered collection of thoughts and resources mostly related to software architecture and software engineering.
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[.NET C#] Unified C# 3.0 Specification
The C# team at csharp-online.net has a download link for a consolidated document presenting the Unified C# 3.0 Specification, which brings together all prior C# specs with the latest version. It weighs in at slightly over 500 pages, but looks to be the most comprehensive documentation yet available for C#, and is an essential reference for any .NET developer working at the deeper levels.
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[Database] Reporting Services Architecture
There is an excellent article on Reporting Services Architecture for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) at csharp-online.net. There is a great diagram on the first page. Reading the article from front to back is a little difficult, as it is broken up in small pieces, but the navigation menu to the right of the text is helpful for moving around when tracking down references. The article presented here is an extract from a book by Michael Lisin and Jim Joseph.
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[Laws] Tobler's Metrics of Civilization
Here is a gift for those who care:
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[Laws] Tobler's Metrics of Civilization
It may look simplistic, but it took me many years to state this clearly.
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[Human Factor] Tobler's Elixir
This is to record something fundamentally important that I wrote long ago.
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[TDD] TDD'ing Sudoku in Ruby
Ron Jeffries, of Extreme Programming fame, and some other folks on the Test Driven Development email list, have started several passes at creating a Sudoku solver by following the TDD approach. I really am enjoying following Ron's pursuit in his article, OK, Sudoku, and in the forum and list messages. Ron is doing a Ruby version, which is even more fun to follow. If you want to see TDD in action, watch as Ron goes about implementing something about which he knew basically nothing when he started. Great fun!
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[Languages] Ruby is coming along on .NET
I have been checking out a couple of newer implementations of Ruby for .NET. Each offers something different and it is obvious that we are getting closer to having a really usable variant of Ruby on .NET in the near future. Here are my current favorite contenders:
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[Languages] A Smalltalk Compiler for .NET - #Smalltalk
A fortuitous incident led me to review the .NET Languages website, which has a great list of .NET languages on its Resources page. There, I found out about a new-to-me compiler, #Smalltalk, that implements Smalltalk to run on .NET. The #Smalltalk system is offered under an Open Software License version 1.1 and the included class library is supposedly "mostly compatible with the ANSI Smalltalk standard." In its current version, #Smalltalk does not have support for GUI development but such is planned for a future release.
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[Tools] Unit Testing for JavaScript
The entire development community probably already knows about this, but I just discovered that an Open Source unit testing framework exists for JavaScript. The framework is JsUnit and it is a port from JUnit. If you find yourself doing extensive work with JavaScript, you may find JsUnit quite useful.
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[.NET General] O Happy Day!
This is just a "happy day" announcement that Microsoft has decided to make all of the Visual Studio .NET Express Editions permanently free! Thank you!