My company, Mercury, is looking for sharp minds with endless passion for code and great creativity. If you consider yourself that sort of a guy and you're looking to work with the very best in the industry(my promise), please contact me(oellenbogen at mercury dot com) and send me your CV.

btw, I have no desire just to pass CVs between my site readers to my company. I would talk with each one of you(and ask you some interesting questions to see if you have the spark) that will pass me his CV before forwarding it to our HR. In addition, if you want to talk with me about "how is it to work there?" or any sort of question you might have about working at Mercury, feel free to drop me a note. I'm eager to join the best of you guys to our company.

Wow, it's an Agile world we're living in isn't it ?

Could you guess how many hits you will get by searching "Good Agile" in google? about 12 million!! "Being Agile", "Agile principles", "Agile stories", "Agile practices", "Good Agile, "Bad Agile" - millions of books and articles out there for us to reach. Buzzwords addicted as we are, we try it all. We pair programming, we work in short iterations, we drop features early and receive early feedbacks, we combine our developers with our QA guys to create some sort of "Feature Team", we use cards, backlogs, big boards with colors, we Scrum, we XP. We practice. We succeed. We fail. We try. Still, a lot of people all over the world claim that Agile Development don't actually work and those methods cause more damage than good. Reading Stevey's post about Good Agile .vs. Bad Agile made me think about my definition for successful agile development. 

Do you ever seen StarGate? if not, it's really not too late to buy a DVD and catch up. In this great TV series, SG-1, the "main" team on StarGate, explore the galaxy through a series of Star-Gates, each one located on a different world, which allow them to move from one gate to another through some sort of wormholes that connect the gates together. Their job is to interact with other species, to establish alliances and to acquire new technologies. SG-1 is my definition for an agile team.

Let me introduce you to the team:

Jack. A confident soldier and the ultimate manager - he will be the first one to take to bullet, always believing in his teammates and letting them do their job with full confidence. Improvise is his nature. His team are his family. He's the one that make the team glue together.

Sam. The genius scientist of the bunch. Do you need someone that will write your Java paper for the university in alien dialect? Do you need to make your car a flying ship from two gums and a rope? Rummer has it that she wrote Skype in pure assembly just for the fun in it and that WCF was actually planned by her(Juval Lowey disagree, though). Never says no (I am naughty...) and always do her job in a professional matter, thinking two(thousands) steps ahead(the 100000 alien she killed concur).

Daniel. "I can talk 10293740447303^2 languages in 2827349*3 different dialects" guy. If you have a beloved dead uncle whom you're dying to talk with, page Daniel and he make it happen. Got a book from 1700BC in Chinese that you are really eager to read, he'll translate it into English in an hour. A passionate guy that manage to calm the team under fire an to make some sense of Jack's nonsense.

Teal'c. The muscles. Teal'c is an alien that joined the team after being slaved to the "gods"(high rank politician with some impressive gun power) in his home-world. He can kill a nation and shave simultaneously. Brave warrior that brings the confidence the team requires during hard times. If you are an AC Milan fan as I am, he is kind of Gatuso - you thank the lord that he's on your team.

You know why SG-1 is the ultimate agile team? because of the people in it and the way the complete each other. See, you can learn the tactics, get the right tools but without the right men in the right position, you are as good as dead. From my experience, there are bunch of actions you can do to make your development process as agile as possible:

• Invest time in developing inner tools for your workers. You need tools to help you code(good IDE), to control your source, to set up a Continues Integration environment, to perform Daily Builds, automatic Unit Testing and Code Coverage, to run automatic UI and Sanity tests. You will want to easily create setup files and deploy them on various testing environments all in a single click. You want fast feedback that your product is stable each and every day.
• Challenge your people on daily basis. Pair them together on tasks that they can teach&learn from each other.
• Give your team members the "small" stuff they need (bigger space, another screen, better chair, more food, whatever!).
• Praise your workers. Glorify them. If they give their best - they deserve that.
• Treat each and every one differently.
• Hire the best people and the best people only. yes, it is worth it. one superstar developer is better than 5 mediocre ones. Don't believe any book or any poor manager that claims otherwise. Hack, don't trust my words, what do I know anyway? Instead, let's all read 100 books of XP and Scrum, miss the deadlines, release crapy code and hate our jobs. We can always blame the management. Superstar developers will build tools that can replace 10 mediocre programmers, so let them do it and give them the stage they need. Superstar developers make your company a place worth working for. Best people bring the best with them. Now, isn't it worth paying some extra for those guys? Don't worry, you will get your $$$ back, I promise.

So agile, in my book, is the confidence you have in your teammates and the greatness of your people and your tools. Without the best people, don't bother doing the rest. at least don't expect for "agile" development. The best you'll get will be Agile Development and that's suck isn't it?

As I mentioned before, Pasha and I are in the process of developing a small application and we still thinking about where to place our Source Control repository. At the beginning, we thought about hosting it on my computer but after a few hours of trying to work with SubVersion (I need to read a little, I thought it would be simpler) configuration and some attempts to configure VSS 2005 I realized (actually, Dror realized, I just nodded) that my router is not suit to serve as a host. We now have 2 solutions: (1) order a new router (about 100$), buy a static IP and configure it properly (as I told Dror: "I'm a code hacker, not a network hacker") which means a lot of time by my side(and 4-7 days of waiting for the router to arrive) or I can (2) pay for a repository server and let someone else take care of static IP, and the configuration. Oren Eini proposed working with www.hosted-projects.com which seems like a nice service - they provide SubVersion & BugTracking for a nice fee. Lacking a solid Source Control really keep us from coding in full speed, so it's urgent to set up our repository in the next couple of days. Any ideas ?

p.s - no, it's not Open Source .

A few days ago a teammate asked to me to help him with a little some-some. This some-some was an event delegation problem (some-some sounds better) that she wanted to implement and wasn't really sure how. The scenario is quite simple, we have a few classes and one of the classes is a little “deep” (deep object graph), meaning:

object of type A 
object of type B 
object of type C 
   inner member of type class D 
     inner member of type class E
      inner member of type class F – known as f1

Now, the value f1 can change, and while it does so, we need to notify the rest of the instances (a1,b1,c1,d1,e1) of that change and provide them some extra details about the change itself. One solution is to add an event to all the classes, register from each one to the inner member event and then f1 can trigger the change to E which will trigger the event to D and then to C->B->A. In short - delegate the call all the way up and around. It seems like a hard job to me - too many places to change, too many events to declare which are not really necessary. I came up with a static Events Notifier solution. Think of it as a repository for registering and triggering events. Here it goes:

public static class EventsNotifier
{
   public static event EventHandler<Status> StatusChanged = delegate {};

   public static TriggerChangeStatus(object sender, Status s)
   {
      StatusChanged(sender, s);
   }
}

Now each class, in its constructor, can register to EventsNotifier.ChangeStatus event and my f1 can call EventsNotifier.TriggerChangeStatus(this, new Status(...)); which will notify the rest of the objects. I know, it's not a perfect solution, but It has its pros. What would you do ?

Let's say we have an entity named "Blog" that has many "Post"s in it:

[ActiveRecord("Blogs")]
public class Blog : ActiveRecordValidationBase<Blog>
{
   private IList _posts;
   // ... snipped ... 

   [HasMany(typeof (Post), 
      Table = "Posts", 
      Lazy = true,
      ColumnKey = "BlogId")]
   public IList Posts
   {
      get { return _posts; }
      set { _posts = value; }
   }
   
   // ... snipped ...
}

Configure your web application to support lazy loading:

1. Use the isWeb="true" attribute in your web.config file - look here for "how to".
2. Open a SessionScope at the beginning of each request - look here for "how to".

Now, How do you know if lazy loading is (really)enabled:

Blog b = Blog.Find(1);
bool isInit = NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized(b.Posts);

If isInit shows true, then lazy loading wasn't enabled and you need to make sure you didn't miss anything. if it shows false - lazy loading is on!

Thanks for Ayende Rahien for pointing on NHibernateUtill, this can be quite handy.

Myself and Pasha are now starting to build a little thing we came up with and we thought that it will be a good idea to use this little baby to learn about the new technologies out there. But you can't learn everything at once right? so we decided to start with Atlas. In addition, we want to take advantage of some sort of infrastructure to perform the common tasks we are all familiar with while developing an application like (1) Data persistence (2) Lazy Loading (3) Caching (4) Data Validation (5) Nullable fields (6) Transaction support and their partners (7) Authorization&Authentication (8) Logging and such. Looking around the net, it seems that ActiveRecord (I see it as an abstract shape of NHibernate, one that makes you smile while mapping your entities and querying them instead of pulling your hair in anger) which is part of Castle Project, support tasks 1-6 pretty damn good so it will be a huge part of my POC. I'm planning to share my insights with you, including the "How To", "Why To" and the complete source code of the POC which will include the skeleton of our infrastructure.

You can download the Castle version(Includes ActiveRecord) I use from here (It is from August 27th, 2006).

Remember "Lnbogen test for Google's rating, the target: Oren Cohen"?
Well, I thought it will take about 2 weeks, but google managed to surprise me. Looking for "Oren Cohen" in google.com will give you my post as the 18th result. Oren is now thinking about publish his pictures\sites in my blog. I guess I should start thinking about a pricing model , I need to provide some food to my kids, support 15 wifes, etc. It can get quite expensive you know...

The proof (you are welcome to search for "Oren Cohen" at google.com yourself, of course):

COM object think that they understand .Net assemblies (via Proxy(tlb file)) but in matter of fact, this proxy is a mediator(girlfriend\gay-friend) to the real assembly that actually make the connection work while .Net assemblies think that they understand COM object, again, via proxy(Interop file) but in matter of fact, this proxy is only a mediator(friend, lesbian-friend) that make the connection work.

The hard migrating process my team encounters this days(and will keep dealing with for the next few iterations) makes you(well, me, but a sorrow shared is a fool's comfort) appreciate one-platform systems. Integration between different platforms can be a female dog (translation: bitch!) if you are not familiar with the tips&tricks on the subject. Working with the registry is a complete disaster. I don't think that the initial idea of MS was to abuse the registry so much and literally write every reference as a long GUID that points to some class\interface\dll. Hack, register a simple dll (via RegSvr32.exe) and unregister it can leave you garbage on the registry, not mentioning migrating VB6 code into VB.NET\C# code which requires RegAsm.exe for "old" clients. So much garbage to cleanup. And you think that throwing the garbage at your home, once every your-wife-is-nagging-again is hard. Think again.

Yes, they(COM, .Net) know how to communicate and live together, but just like Men and Women - you can't really understand how it actually works.

I wonder if I should start writing a book on the topic...

p.s - don't get me wrong, women are hard to understand but it's only making the game more fun. So does the migration challange.

I was just laughing with my teammate Oren Cohen (Yes, we have 2 "Oren" in the team. We solve it via alias(=namespace) so my name is "Boogi" but this is a story for another day). I made a point that I managed to "publish" a few friends of mine here by mentioning their name (Amir Markowitz, Dror Engel, Ken Egozi, Moran Benisty) and during that conversation I searched for "Oren Cohen" at Google.com which returned about ~627,000 results, non of them are related to the "subject"(Oren Cohen, my teammate). I wondered how much time it will take from the second I'll publish this post until he will be rated from my site.

But let's make it interesting OK?
Let's make a "virtual bet" (one beer for the winner on my expense): my bet is that in 2 weeks - he will be on the first 50 results for "Oren Cohen" in google.com.

All bets are on!

<rational thinking>

Let's assume we have a WebSite(the same issue applied to WebService btw) named WebApplication1. Now, we want to put its(the website's) output files into some other directory (!= "bin" directory) for development reasons (working as part of a team with some sophisticated Source Safe). What's the first thing you (and me) do? we use our "rational" programmer nature and Right-Click on the project->Properties->Build Tab->and changing the Output path to whatever we need.

(Instead of "bin\" we can write here "..\..\infrastructure" for example)

We then build the all thing and surprise surprise, the new output path contains all the dlls as expected. Awesome!
Satisfied with the greatness of Visual Studio .Net 2005, we now want to Publish the WebSite so we(or the QA) can play with it. "Think as a developer, think as a developer" I say to myself and Right-Click the WebSite project->Publish... A few really easy "decisions" and ~10 seconds later, VS.NET tells(it speaks to me, I swear) me that my site was published successfully.

Happy as a little girl with a new puppy, I enter my site: http://localhost/webapp1/Default.aspx and Oops!

The page can't find its "code behind"(The class that it inherits from)! What the hack is going on here!?

Well, it turns out that the Publish process is not as smart as you may think it should be. Changing our Output path to another directory (!= "bin") caused this all mess as the Publish process simply copy all the files from the bin directory into the new(Published) bin directory. No questions asked. The Publish algorithm do not check if you actually compile your dlls into another directory via Output path and taking it into account.

</rational thinking>

<effective thinking>

Fortunately for us, the solution is pretty easy: define your Output path into the original location ("bin\") and use the Build Events(post-build in this scenario) in order to copy the output files into your "infrastructure"(or whatever) directory like this:

(The command: xcopy /Y /S ${TargetDir}*.* ..\..\Infrastructure)

</effective thinking>

May it save you the 15 minutes it took me and my teammate Hagay to solve this one.