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"if(dev) is the vNext.org home page and main blog about whats hot now in the dev world from HTML5 and Android to win8 and Phone7. Want to know what everyone else is into? Trying to stay a breast of the current technologies, then if(dev) is the one blog source for you."

"User Story is suitable for describing what user needs, but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can't write code from user stories because you have no clue on what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can't test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of "Context" and "Cause and Effect", and the imprecise way of saying "As a...I want... so that..." leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there's no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story. "

"In my consultant career, no matter the kind of company I visited, from the tiny startup to the largest fortune 500 corporation, they all have in common to be entangled in spaghetti. Spaghetti means poorly structured code. Spaghetti means high maintenance and evolution cost. Spaghetti means frustration, friction and lack of motivation for everyone in the team. And often, spaghetti means project failure."

"In this walkthrough I'll guide you through the steps of configuring a development environment for Service Bus for Windows Server (Service Bus 1.0 Beta) and creating a simple application. This post is a condensed version of the contents from previous link. If you'd rather to read the whole document, you are welcome to do so. On the other hand, if you prefer a shorter version with step-by-step guidance, please read on! Throughout the post we'll also touch upon key concepts you need to understand to manage and use Service Bus. So, if you learn better with hands-on experiments, this is a perfect post (I hope) for you to get started. "

"The following tutorial guides you through the steps required to create a basic Service Bus for Windows Server application, and contains the following steps:"

" The Xcoordination Application Space is a small framework to make writing asynchronous and distributed applications easier. It´s based on the concept of Space Based Computing which revolves around the notion of autonomous functional units communicating only indirectly and possibly in a stateful manner."

"From time to time I hear people asking what value of test coverage (also called code coverage) they should aim for, or stating their coverage levels with pride. Such statements miss the point. Test coverage is a useful tool for finding untested parts of a codebase. Test coverage is of little use as a numeric statement of how good your tests are."

" Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a managed code library, a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL), accessible from any language targeting the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CCR addresses the need of service-oriented applications to manage asynchronous operations, deal with concurrency, exploit parallel hardware and deal with partial failure. It enables the user to design applications so that the software modules or components can be loosely coupled; meaning they can be developed independently and make minimal assumptions about their runtime environment and other components. This approach changes how the user can think of programs from the start of the design process and deals with concurrency, failure and isolation in a consistent way."

"Do you need to get your Java-based and .NET-based components to work together? JNBridgePro allows you to connect anything Java to anything .NET, anywhere: whether your components are running in the same process, across a network, or in the cloud. JNBridgePro's high-performance bridging architecture removes the complexities of cross-platform interop; you can generate a solution within a day - instead of weeks. "

"The data-quality solution provided by Data Quality Services (DQS) enables a data steward or IT professional to maintain the quality of their data and ensure that the data is suited for its business usage. DQS is a knowledge-driven solution that provides both computer-assisted and interactive ways to manage the integrity and quality of your data sources. DQS enables you to discover, build, and manage knowledge about your data. You can then use that knowledge to perform data cleansing, matching, and profiling. You can also leverage the cloud-based services of reference data providers in a DQS data-quality project."

"This new toolset and approach will revolutionize the way individuals and organizations: design, build and deploy their repeatable solutions by capturing, incorporating and scaling-out their best practices, knowledge and expertise to increase the consistency, predictability, supportability and maintenance of solutions they deliver. "

"Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach of how to model the core logic of an application. The term itself was coined by Eric Evans in his book "Domain Driven Design". The basic idea is that the design of your software should directly reflect the Domain and the Domain-Logic of the (business-) problem you want to solve with your application. That helps understanding the problem as well as the implementation and increases maintainability of the software."

"I'll let you in on a secret: I don't care what letter you put in front of "DD." I don't care so much about how code is written or the ins-and-outs of software development. It's not because I don't realize how incredibly important it is - it's because what I care most about is the value delivered. How can what you do save me time, money and/or frustration? I'm smart enough to know that without you - the incredibly talented member of the development team - my life will go into a tailspin. Nothing will work. I realize and appreciate that what you develop creates value for me."

"We thank everyone who joined us for Jeff Sutherland's presentation on the Secrets of High Quality Development which is now available on-demand for those who may have missed it. Below, Jeff has answered some of your questions that we did not have time for during the live event. We hope you find it valuable. Please feel free to ask any additional questions in the comments. "

"Do you feel that estimating the documentation effort required for a project is nothing short of predicting the future? This view is strengthened when the estimates are inaccurate and the project is plagued with variance in scope and delays in delivery."

" Performance is a topic of increasing importance in the software industry. Today performance engineers and architects as well as operations people have to ensure that complex application landscapes works seemlessly and problems are resolved fast and with minimal effort. "

"Gabriel Schenker's excellent series of posts on "How we got rid of the database" offers a great insight on the benefits of a CQRS/ES application. One of the problems often seen with designing user interfaces that introduce eventual consistency into the mix is how to present this new paradigm to the end user. But whether we've thought or not, eventual consistency is all around us, as Gabriel points out in a few examples:"

"As a change agent, you constantly need to reassure people that the path we follow is worthwhile traveling. This need is often expressed in the form of critique and difficult questions. When I coach Agile teams, this is often the case. The same thing happens when introducing Kanban. However, I noticed that Kanban raises much harder questions on a management and leadership level, once people are introduced to the basics and start to explore the subject on their own. For instance: "How can we plan if we measure instead of estimate?""

"State machines. State charts. Automata. Whatever name you may have heard them called, they are a great tool for some situations."

"A large number of the world's applications manipulate money values. Here is a convenient, high-performance money structure for the CLR which handles arithmetic operations, currency types, formatting, and careful distribution and rounding without loss."