Michael McGuire's Blog

Learning velocity

Michael — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:08:42 +0000

Part of the reason for this blog is as a self help aid to encourage myself to make that extra effort to be constantly learning something new and if possible to be giving something back to the community.

Now there are endless self-help techniques out there to aid learning but I have come up with an idea I’d like to run with and that is the idea of generating some kind of metric to measure my own learning velocity. The term velocity I’m borrowing from the agile movement where it is a measure of how fast a team is operating in terms of how many prioritised tasks they can complete in a cycle.

So i am going to use the same idea but apply it to my own learning process, basically I plan to score myself on things like how many blog post I make, learning a new tool, reading something that makes my mind click, helping a colleague with a problem or sharing an insight. Quite how i’m going to award points to each item I’m not sure yet and whether I’ll be brave enough to actually share the results I’m not sure but we will see

This is very sad :(

Michael — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:46:15 +0000

Just saw this posted Entity Framework vote of no confidence and think it’s pretty ridiculous that people are prepared to give other developers such a virtual kicking. Sure EF vs NHibernate/Other ORM’s is a real vietnam at the moment but I wonder how many of the signatories on the petition have actually dloaded EF and given it a going over and have listened to what the dev’s have to say re: it’s future direction.

This is not healthy debate.

p.s. must dload and play with EF but too busy learning NHibernate

Unity Tutorials Code Upload

Michael — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:52:37 +0000

Thought I’d Zip up the code for the Unity Tutorials completed so far if anyone wants a play. The resources at the moment for getting started are pretty thin on the ground and the API docs barely mention XML configuration so hopefully these will help some folks get started.

Decorators with Unity tutorial added

Michael — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:53:01 +0000

Have a look here

Constructor Injection Unity Tutorial Added

Michael — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:28:59 +0000

9. Constructor Injection

10. Setter Injection

Unity Container Samples

Michael — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:01 +0000

About a year back I was introduced to Castle Windsor IOC container and at the time I found a fantastic resource over at http://wiki.bittercoder.com/Default.aspx?Page=ContainerTutorials written by Alex Henderson that provided a series of tutorials exploring the various features of castle in an extremely easy to read format.

Roll one year forward and I find myself playing around with Microsoft’s Unity DI framework and figured that a great way to explore the features in direct comparison to Castle Windsor would be to re-run the tutorials but using Unity.

Anyway’s I hope people find this as much use as I found Alex’s work previously.

NB: I have deliberately chosen to refrain from giving my thoughts on which framework is better. Bear in mind though that Unity v1.1 at the time I write this still has a lot of work going into it.

Unity Container Tutorials

10 Print “Hello World!”

Michael — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:42:02 +0000

Welcome to my new blog. I’m an IT Consultant/Contractor based in the UK and I have of late been trying to drag my skill level up a notch or two and have some fun along the way while exploring the ever expanding world of .NET. So here goes…