StrangeLog - The (english) blog of Andrea Saltarello

NSK goes to CodePlex

Andrea Saltarello — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 10:03:00 GMT

Northwind Starter Kit has moved to CodePlex: the new home page is here.

Technorati Tags: codeplex NSK

INETA web site talks about italian UG meetings

Andrea Saltarello — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 10:58:00 GMT

Thanks to my friend Lorenzo, the italian page of INETA Europe website is up and running. Even better, the page shows the annoucement of UGIdotNET's next meeting. All hail for Lorenzo!

Technorati Tags: UGIdotNET INETA

Northwind Starter Kit source code released

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 01:32:00 GMT

As my friend Dino already announced, the Northwind Starter Kit has finally been released. Let me just bore you with a little bit of history. During the last years, I noticed a growing interest within the .NET community for topics (I'm in love with) like: design patterns, unit testing, (agile) methodologies and so on. Being a regular speaker at Microsoft events here in Italy, I found myself in need to set up presentations and demos covering these topics. Instead of creating "synthetic" code, I decided to create a simple "reference" application in order to show it during my talks. This app:

Should be based on a layered architecture, implemented as a service layer and sporting a "real world" domain model
Should use well-known design patterns and eventually idiomatic design considerations, showing the rationale behind all these choices
Should use Northwind as its default database, in order to easen its deploy. It should also be decoupled from the physical structure of the database, in order to allow to use different stores
Should offer unit tests
Should be available with both web-based and smart client GUIs
Should be documented in... some way :-)

Since I'm not a full time speaker/trainer/author (I must confess that in my real life I work as a software architect at Managed Designs), I could only use spare time in order to implement the the application: I had some working code, but it was far from being (and still is, to be honest) the "reference app" I dreamt about. So I looked around in order to make this app a community supported project, christening it "Northwind Starter Kit" (NSK) and releasing it under the Common Public License. Then I contacted luKa and Ricky that accepted to be part of the "core team" of the project, and later even Dino joined the project. Last week we released a first drop of the code, on which we're still working. So, what re we going to do from now on? We won't save the world. We'll simply continue to work on the project, hoping to see both the app and the team growing as time passes. There's still a *lot* of work to do. Would you like to help us? Download the archive, expand it, modify the connection string stored within the config file, and run your favourite flavour of the GUI (windows or web). Should you: have trouble doing this, experience exceptions using the application or spot errors within the source code, please contact me or discuss the issue(s) using the forums in order to give us feedback. We hope we will be able to set up a collaborative development process: time will tell, but in the meanwhile, we'll continue to work onto NSK.

Technorati Tags: NSK

New kids on the... blog

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:20:00 GMT

It seems that my friend (and VB/WPF guru at Managed Designs) Corrado started its english blog. Don't miss it!

[OT] Anders Powers

Andrea Saltarello — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 18:24:00 GMT

Ok... Coulnd't resist to reveal Anders real identity to the world: the truth is out there! <g>

Membership API article (reloaded)

Andrea Saltarello — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 14:25:00 GMT

Dino just told me that our article has been puslished in the european edition of MSDN Magazine, too. Honest: I'm waiting to receive my copy in order to understan how this new edition of the mag differentiates from the US one.

Some thoughts about ASP.NET 2.0

Andrea Saltarello — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:01:00 GMT

As Soma pointed out, VS2005 is finally out: it's been a long way since the early bits we (alpha testers) got in May 2003. These are a bunch of thoughts of mine about ASP.NET v2 I wrote for Microsoft EMEA "Beta Experience" newsletter.

Strange things happening during Microsoft events...

Andrea Saltarello — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:57:00 GMT

The one where I, as the .NET Padawan, try to save the community from Lorenzo the Sith, a.k.a. Darth Java.

Microsoft, where do you want to go tomorrow?

Andrea Saltarello — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 12:42:00 GMT

Thanks to my friend Lorenzo, I got the news about Ward Cunningham leaving Microsoft. I had the pleasure and honour to meet Ward at the CodeSlam night we had at the Campus in Seattle, during the MVP Summit, and I remember how happy I was when he joined MS, a couple of years ago. Ward leaving is MS really is bad, bad news. But the worse part is that I do really can't blame neither him nor his choice to become the tenth Eclipse employee. Frankly, I cannot understand the rationale behind having Ward on board and limiting him within the PAG team, while I *suppose* he could be great help (at least) for the TFS Product Team. And... What about NUnit's creator James Newkirk, who's also employed within the PAG team? And... What's the point in announcing an unaffordable price for TFS? And.. Again , why aren't we going to get the unit testing toolkit with *every* Visual Studio edition? To me, the whole strategy behind Microsoft's approach to the project life-cycle management appears questionable (at the very least).

Source: It's Official: Ward Cunningham Hired By Eclipse