assumption of advancement

Knowledge Transfer in Times of Technology Change

Patrick — Sat, 03 May 2025 17:47:10 +0000

Let’s face it: Technology changes in software development aren’t rare events, they’re practically the background noise of our industry. Especially in the evolving .NET world, where frameworks, tools, and deployment models are constantly shifting, staying on top means more than just learning new tools or technologies. It means preserving, sharing, and actively managing knowledge before it walks out the door or gets buried in yesterday’s code. Because here’s the kicker: Much of your team’s know-how isn’t in a shared wiki,...

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NDC 2014

Patrick — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:16:24 +0000

I attended this year’s NDC (Norwegian developer conference) in Oslo. It was a very interesting conference, but as a short summary, it saw something like a consolidation. JavaScript – as some people say in its fourth generation (Simple Scripts, AJAX, MVC-Framworks, SPA) – is finally accepted as a language like C# or Java. Also in the agile world there is no hype anymore about Scrum or Kanban. It was more how and when to use it.One major topic, which I...

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Build your private git infrastructure

Patrick — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:00:25 +0000

I’ve got for several years a virtual server to put my own projects under version control. I started with CVS, then migrated to SVN and now I’m start thinking to migrate all the old projects to git. This because I like git very much and I use it personally for several years now. The first question but was: “Not invented here”-syndrom? Why not using github or codeplex or any other public platform which offers git support. Well, some of my...

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Migrate a VSS repository to TFS

Patrick — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Recently I had to migrate parts from a Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 2005 repository to a Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 repository. In this blog post I show what I had to do and what the pitfalls were. The tool To migrate a repository you have at least two possibilities: Migrate the latest snapshot or the whole history. Normally you prefer a migration of the whole history, so you don’t loose the gained advantage of an version control system. To migrate...

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VDD – the new programming manifesto?

Patrick — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

When I was at the NDC, I had also the possibility to visit with colleagues the city of Oslo. During a stop in front of a little shop, a colleague discovered a post card about Viking laws. When I read it, I was really surprised how well the laws fit to today’s software practices. The Viking laws are grouped in four paragraphs. I pick the most interesting laws for each paragraph and try to make some relations to the software...

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My personal wrap-up of the NDC 2012

Patrick — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 22:43:34 +0000

I was at the Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC) 2012 in Oslo. It is one of the best conferences I know in Europe. One reason is, that a lot of alpha-geeks are speaking there. There were during three days 8 parallels tracks, so you have to manage your program. My program looked like this: Wednesday, 6.6.2012 Keynote, Aral Balkan Decisions, Decisions, Dan North Professional Software Development, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) Agile Estimating, Mike Cohn Modeling Distributed Systems with NServiceBus Studio,...

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Quality isn’t a tool–You can’t install it!

Patrick — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:52:11 +0000

Did you ask yourself why a team in an organization produces very good software quality and another team in the same organization just struggles to get things done and those things are in really bad quality? Interesting is also that for both teams exists the same rules (methologies, procedures, tools, frameworks, etc.). But why could and does this happen? Some people – mostly managers or vendors – try to distill quality to a recipe. Vendors could sell it expensively (with...

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Are stale data evil?

Patrick — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:38:51 +0000

When you’re a software engineer who produces software for enterprises like banks or assurances, then it is normal you have huge databases (several gigabytes). Such systems have an operative application where users do the daily business of the company and there are more informative parts (or strategic parts) of the systems which the management uses. At a first glance, there isn’t a problem with those two views, but as you probably know, those companies have for the second part for...

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Anti-Pattern ‘Validation by Execute ‘n’ Rollback’

Patrick — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:53:12 +0000

Recently in some reviews I saw an anti-pattern. First you have to know, in the code, there was a validation of the data before it was stored in the database. So far so good. But when I looked at the validation code, I saw the following: public void Validate() { DoProcess(true); } And the persist logic (with some business logic) looked like this: public void Process() { DoProcess(false); } So, I asked myself, what the Boolean means. Well, here is...

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Who should make decisions about technologies?

Patrick — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest problems of software engineering companies in Switzerland is currently to get new software developers. To get new employees there are several points as for example salary, environment, career possibilities and technologies. The last point looks easy but in reality it isn’t that easy. Why are essential technology decisions (like languages, frameworks, application servers or big libraries) not only made by developers? Why does the management mostly make those decisions? In this blog post I try to...

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