Distributed Weekly 3

Not much of interest happened in the distributed computing space this past week. Instead, here is a link to a blog post comparing agile self-organizing teams to lean leadership .

Agile/Lean Development

• Agile Self-Organization versus Lean Leadership

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Distributed Weekly 2

This week sports a new name for these posts, and a link to a contract toolkit from Microsoft R&D. It kind of reminds me of the explicit precondition/post-condition declarations in Eiffel.

WF

• Sequential and Flowchart Modeling Styles *

Contract-First Development

• Code Contracts
• Code Contracts Primer – Part 1: Introduction
• Code Contracts Primer – Part 2: Handling Legacy Code
• Code Contracts Primer – Part 3: Providing Support for Unit Tests *

REST

• Transactions are bad for REST **
  

* Courtesy of Sam Gentile
* Courtest of Stefan Tilkov

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Distributed Weekly 1

The big news for this week is the release of the Enterprise Service Bus Toolkit 2.0. The best part of this release is the ESB Toolkit has moved from being a Codeplex project to a fully-supported Microsoft product offering.

• ESB Toolkit 2.0 on MSDN
• ESB Toolkit 2.0 Download
• ESB Toolkit 2.0 Documentation

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Out With KDE, In With Xfce

I want to like KDE 4, I really do. I have been running a KDE desktop since version 2.1. I loved the changes that came in version 3.x. Most of my favorite Linux applications are KDE-based. The numerous bugs and instability in KDE 4 have finally taken their toll.

The final straw was the all to frequent crashes that locked up the keyboard and mouse. Nothing ruins your work day like having your computer hard lock two or three times while in the middle of writing code. Add to that random bugs and glitches in various Plasma widgets and broken printing support in Okular and you have a desktop that is basically unusable. On a side note, I am also dismayed by the direction that the Amarok project has taken. Version 1.3 was the finest audio player on any platform. For version 2.x, the Amarok team has apparently decided to toss out most of the features that made 1.3 totally awesome and replace them with a stripped-down feature set and a confusing user interface. I do not understand why they decided to make that change.

Rather than continue to suffer, I have decided to switch back to Xfce. I still dislike GNOME, so I do not see that as an option. Though at the end of the day both are based on GTK+, so I will most likely end up using more than a few GNOME applications. In fact, since Firefox and OpenOffice.org are both GTK+-based and are applications I use every day, Xfce may be a better fit for the way I work. Now I just have to find GTK+ replacements for some of my existing KDE applications. KDE 4.3 is slated for release at the end of July, but I do not think I am going to bother to check it out. Maybe after a couple more releases it will stabilize into something I can use.

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