IntelliJ IDEA plugin contest 2007

Today the winners of the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA plugin contest were announced. The first prize goes to the XSLT-Debugger by Sascha Weinreuter followed by the Struts 2 and the database navigator plugins. The team leader's choice goes to IntelliJad. Congratulations!!

a batch of new copies

On Friday I got the message from my wonderful editor that O'Reilly wants to start a reprint of my book in a couple of weeks, not a complete new reprint but a new batch of copies including the same content. Not bad for a book which was published only three months before. After publishing the eBook that are the next interesting news ...

My visit at the .NET User Group Cologne

Yesterday I was guest at the January meeting of the .NET User Group Köln (dnugk). I arrived a bit late at about 7.30 pm after finishing my daily project work and missed the beginning of the first talk: Silverlight 1.1 alpha by Stefan Lieser. The talk was nice giving a good impression what is going on in this field. As Silverlight 1.1 is shipped with an own language runtime (CLR) it is possible to develop with languages like JavaScript, Python and Ruby (beside C# and VB.NET of course). BTW: Microsoft will broadcast the olympic summer games 2008 in Beijing on MSN with Silverlight. ... this will spread the usage definitely!

Comparing all this stuff I saw with JavaFX I question how much time is necessary to catch up the advance of Silverlight, Flash ... (Sun's speed to build up the JavaFX infrastructure is thrilling though). BTW: Interesting was to see the Visual Studio from today .. a lot of eye candy. As I got in touch with .NET some years ago all this looked more frumpy.

The second talk was given by Heiko Hatzfeld. He told a bit about Test-Driven Development. As an agile professional it was interesting to see the .NET view on this topic. Heiko gave some introductions and a demo. Nice to see NUnit in action. A discussion started when unit tests end and when integration tests start. In my opinion if you leave your close unit artifact view and access foreign (from the class point of view) ressources (like a database), you definitely have an integration test. Possibly it would have been even better to mention the role of mock objects more often during this talk phase. Good was that he mentioned JUnit's approach to create a new instance for all separate tests. He told us that NUnit does not do this. I would like to add that TestNG also goes this approach and is more feature-rich for complex tests than JUnit.

Overall a very nice experience. A good atmosphere with about ~30 members and the service at the location was outstanding. It was not the last time there for me definitely. Today I suggested doing a cross-over event where the JUGC meets the dnugk. There is a lot of potential for this.