Death of Experiments with smart client factory and a new beginning with Eclipse

I have been away for a while from the blogosphere and looking back, i believe it's been damn good. As luck would have it, the upcoming project was stalled due to budgetary constraints. So I long stopped working ( or rather playing) with SmartClient factory although I am still game for it. I was assigned to a different project that was enhancement+maintenance kind of work that consumed my 4 hrs of unofficial time as well ( above the 10-12 official hrs i clock btw).

If you have read my previous posts, you would know we started with SCRUM - an agile project management approach. Obviously, i was also inclined towards other agile practices and I have recently tried my hands on lean management as well. One agile practice that stands out for me is and I must say I am addicted to it, so much so that I do not even feel like writing simple test applications without having tests first. Apart from several books, I think the best resource has been the TestDrivenDevelopment _at_ Y!groups.com. I will make an attempt to write about TDD on a topic that has not been covered by experts in future.

Since the project I was assigned did not even follow any unit testing methodology ( several architects in the past have tried and failed miserably ;-) ) and I was soon becoming a TDD freak, thought it would be a nice challenge to take up. I did not want my principles to shake and did succeed in implementing a complete enhancement using TDD ( though I was the lone TDDer.. i hope to change that soon).

The past tense was intentional. Recently, all of a sudden, I have been hot swapped into another so called critical & deeply red project. This new project is based on Eclipse and makes use of EMF, GEF and GMF. Whats interesting is Smart client factory is supposed to be the exact look alike of Eclipse or that has been my learning so far from my experiments and readings. So there is the link between my last post and this post, and the sole motivation to bring my identity back to life.

I will write more frequently.. lots of topics to cover.. so once again keep watching this space for some "common sense material" as common sense is not common at all! ( yes that's been one of my learnings in the past 9 months)..

Happy reading..