Ralf's Sudelbücher

[Abstract for English speaking readers: The prio .NET developer conference was a success. Its concept of setting an overall topic - this time "Software production process" - and looking for speakers to fill the predefined session topics to form a homogeneous whole was very well received by the attendees. Instead of a "mille fleurs" conference we termed it a "conceptual conference" and will keep this format for the prio 2007.]

• An einem bestimmten Tag bin ich in einem bestimmten Café in einer bestimmten Stadt und stehe für alle Anliegen in Sachen .NET-Softwareentwicklung zur Verfügung. Weil ich gern die Atmosphäre von Cafés genieße und es schöne Orte zum druckfreien Gespräch sind, habe ich mir gedacht, dieses Consulting-Angebot eben in Cafés anzubieten. Da lässt sich Angenehmes mit Nützlichem schön verbinden. Und einzigartig ist dieses Angebot auch noch, oder? Denn wer hätte schon von einer Kaffeehauskonsultation gehört? :-)
• Wer Interesse hat, kommt einfach vorbei, schildert sein Problem (mit oder ohne Laptop oder Unterlagen; Skizzen machen wir mit Vision oder auf Papier) und ich versuche nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen Rat zu geben. Ich bin gewiss, dass wir uns im Dialog einer Lösung immer annähern werden.
• Eine solche Sitzung ist kostenlos - eine Einladung zur heißen Schokolade schlage ich aber nicht aus :-)
• Um möglichst vielen Interessenten die Gelegenheit zu geben, mich im Kaffeehaus zu konsultieren, ist die Sitzungsdauer zunächst einmal begrenzt auf 90 Minuten. Aber keine Angst, in 90 Minuten lässt sich oft schon einiges klären. Guter Rat hat ja viele Formen. Er kann in einer handfesten Lösung bestehen, aber auch in einem klärenden, reflektierenden Gespräch oder in einer Orientierung für das weitere Vorgehen. Guter Rat rückt vor allem den Wald wieder in den Blick, der in Problemsituationen oft beim Herumirren zwischen den Bäumen aus den Augen verloren wird.
• Ratsuchende melden sich bitte vorher per Email an.

• München, 29.11.2006, 10h-18h im Café Eisbach, Marstallplatz 3 (Zentrum) [Karte], [Anmeldung]
• Hamburg, 8.12.2006, 9h-17h im elbgold Café, Mühlenkamp 6a (Uhlenhorst) [Info, Karte], [Anmeldung] 

   

[Summary for English speaking blog readers: The Professional Developer College is offering a special training for software professionals to develop their speaker and presentation skills. Instead of attending yet another general presentation training, developers, architects, project leads or their manager can now an education focused on how to do technical presentations or product demonstrations before a developer audience. The training is honed for software professionals because their content and their audience are special. Doing a session at a developer conference like TechEd or DevWeek is different from doing a sales presentation or wedding speech. Ralf Westphal, experienced speaker at national and international developers events, and Renate Klein, experienced communication trainer, team up to deliver an intensive two day seminar where at the end, all attendees will do their final presentations before a large and realistic audience. Any developer can learn to become an inspiring speaker and show-off his technical expertise before a developer audience. It just needs some training.]

English abstract:  I´m happy to announce I won the first BASTA! .NET Award, category 'Community', for my "lifetime achievements" regarding informing and educating the .NET community.

Constant software quality assessment might be deemed important by almost all developers. But it´s a long way from agreeing or preaching something to actually living it in your projects. It often needs good tools to make theory easy to implement in practice. NUnit, NMock, NAnt, ReSharper are examples of such tools which make testing, building, refining your code easier. And NDepend could be one such tool too for quality assessment - but at least in my view it tries to do too much to be easy to adopt while being under pressure in a tight project schedule.

I seem to have stumble upon something here with my look under the hood of the .NET Framework an other tools. Many readers where surprised and fascinated by what you can actually do with quality assessment tools like Lattix LDM or a simple concept like DSM (Dependency Structure Matrix) with its easy to understand and scalable depiction of the dependencies within a software.

Have you ever thought about the quality of your code? Well, I bet. Have you ever strived for a sound architecture of your software solutions? Well, I hope. Do you have a process in place to constantly monitor the quality of your software´s architecture and code? Well, you should. But not only should you. Every single software team should. Planning for quality and constant qualitiy monitoring should be the fundamental activities in any software project.

The week before last Neno Loje and I did a workshop at the Computer Science department of the University of Hamburg, Germany, to verify a couple of our ideas on software development. We offered this workshop to the university for free, to give students of unfortunately notoriously underfinanced public educational institutions a chance to "get in touch with the real world". Their usual curriculum does not cover .NET much and their approach to software development is quite different from how real project teams work in the Microsoft universe. So we wanted to introduce them to .NET in general, but our focus was on working with a team according to how we think a software project should be approached. For that we had 5 days.