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Introduction

This article deals with an idea that I believe to be one of the key concepts of modern programming. When I say modern, I'm referencing to methodologies that re-appeared with hype names and excessive power during the second half of the 90's and the beginning of the 21^st century as an answer to the bureaucratic, slow and heavy regulated methods in use at the time. As some of their examples are: ASD(Adaptive Software Development), DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method), Scrum, XP(Extreme Programming) among others...

These methodologies, that were known as lightweight methods until year 2001 and then became the Agile Software Development, have some aspects in common. At first, they were "born" from the developers necessity to focus more on the product in which they're working on than in hard processes related to development. It means that, unlike the classic long-term strategies and specifications that predict and document the entire project from the beginning to the end, the development is made in small iterations, with minimal planning. Another important factor is that these methodologies are in favour of face-to-face communication rather than written documentation among the team members (which are small, around 5-9 people). Third and most important to all programmers, in my humble opinion, is the constant execution of automated tests in all steps to ensure the quality of each small unit of code they generate.

Despite being an interesting topic, I'll stop my wondering here, because it's not my goal to teach techniques to manage software teams, but to teach one of the things that all of those techniques will be require you to do. Before anything, I want to remind you that a programmer will always program, so that doesn't matter too much what methodology is adopted by the company where you are working on. For fun, below is a strip from Geek Hero Comic that was kindly provided by the author Salvatore Iovene for this article:

For those who don't know yet, this is the third article of a series that I committed myself to write. Here is the list of articles:

1. ASP, a misinterpreted technology
2. Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
3. TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
4. Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
5. Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
6. "Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
7. Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

If you're reading one of my articles for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read the previous ones first, because I'm trying to lead you into a great abstraction, presenting the topics incrementally.

Better late than never! From now on, all my recent open-source contributions will be available at my github.com account. The current projects are:

• ASP Xtreme Evolution (my ASP framework)
• Exuberant-ctags (updates to make it's ASP parsing better)
• Gedit-* (a lot of good things for gedit)
• GTKSourceView-2.0 (updates to add/enhance language.specs)
• jquery-vs-mootools (this one is an interesting article I translated)

Although this blog isn't being informative and updated as I think it should be, I'm currently very active and developing a lot of things but not writing much about it. Watching my git account will help you to keep the track of the latest updates in my software development. Enjoy!

Introduction

Sometime ago I spent a good amount of time playing with Wez Furlong PHPScript to merge PHP functionalities directly into ASP pages. Although it really can be done, I couldn't feel comfortable enough with the stability of the final application. In fact, the merge between PHP and other ASP languages (VBScript, Javascript, Ruby, Perl and Python) in the same script caused the application to work only in odd requests and not in even ones. Plus it was triggering processing errors in the server. This is incredibly strange and clearly shows that the Active Script port of PHP is flawed. It works fine for .wsc and other command lines things but not plays well with ASP.

Since PHP has a huge community which create really good things, it's interesting to get the benefits of their work in other environments that doesn't run the language. Two notable examples of the good things available in PHP are GeSHi, an incredible code highlighting extension that currently work with over than 130 languages, and Tidy, a nice extension to wrap and indent your XML and HTML. As we can't live without them, I've built the webservices for them both.

Today's geekherocomic.com strip came with an interesting news. It's Salvatore Iovene birthday! And the post was about the book his fiancée built with the last entire year strips archive. I really like this guy work, it's a funny part of my day and to celebrate this special occasion I created a gadget to all GeekHeroComic readers to monitor the latest strip directly from iGoogle homepage.

You can add it using:

Happy birthday @siovene! Keep doing this amazing work!

Introduction

In this article, I'll speak a little about some issues that I believe are relevant to all modern programmers. However the examples will be written in ASP/VBScript+JScript, so I'll be coherent with the purpose of these articles, which will showcase ASP as an extremely versatile and efficient environment. Here is the list of articles:

1. ASP, a misinterpreted technology
2. Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
3. TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
4. Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
5. Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
6. "Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
7. Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

If you're reading one of my articles for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read the previous ones first, because I'm trying to lead you into a great abstraction, presenting the topics incrementally.