I had the pleasure of attending the Continuous Deployment Breakfast with Eric Ries last week. Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology, Co-Founded IMVU who’s known for deploying code to production as many as 50 times per day!

In Agile, there’s this notion that there’s someone “out there” (e.g., the Product Owner) who has all the answers about what the product should do. However, Lean Startup says no one has all the answers. This, of course, makes sense in a startup where where the customer is To Be Determined. But I wonder if it doesn’t hold a bit of truth even for more established products… does one person really hold all the answers?

And so – if we’re not sure what the right thing to build is, our most important task becomes learning.

Read More…..

Apologies for the slow down in posts, I’ve been head’s down in code bringing you more tutorials on LINQ to SQL and how to use it with my current obsession, Windows Presentation Foundation.

It has now been expanded into 3 parts – aka, everything you ever-never wanted to know about LINQ to SQL:

1. Mapping Tables to Objects
2. Adding/Updating/Deleting Data
3. WPF Data Binding with LINQ to SQL

These tutorials describe how to manually map your classes to database tables with LINQ to SQL so you can have support for M:M relationships as well as WPF data binding using my own hack workaround solution to providing this functionality. One person even claimed my code was cleaner then the auto-generated code, but I’ll leave that for you to decide yourself.

But… even if you do choose to auto-generate your classes, understanding how these techniques work will allow you to expand the code to better fit your application’s needs and troubleshoot issues when they arise.

I hope these help you out in your own encounters with LINQ to SQL!

For the source code inclined in each of you, I just posted an application and tutorial on LINQ, .NET’s Language Integrated Query, on The Code Project.

It shows how to map database tables to classes with LINQ and then retrieve the data in the very cool LINQ-manner that makes me ooh and ahh for doing more with C#.  It also includes a simple WPF GUI that uses data binding to display the data and navigate the relationships because, well, WPF data binding is sexy.

I hope you enjoy!

A LINQ Tutorial: Mapping Tables to Objects

Gratuitous brag update: This article was just selected as Editor’s Choice on The Code Project (w00t!)

This is priceless:

» A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages by James Iry on the One Div Zero blog.