My head has finally stopped spinning enough that I can finally write this post. Before I dig into it though let me give some context. A few weeks ago a post by Kyle Baley shows up in my feed reader which is in response to a post by Roy Osherove. Now both of these posts were on the subject of whether the entry barrier to Software Development is to high. More specifically though these posts were directly targeting TDD, Agile, Mock Objects, Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, NHibernate, etc… Just imagine for a minute you are in a round room with doors all around you. Each door looks the same and has a small yellow light hanging above it. Now, you have to pick a door, but which door do you pick? But You can peek into the door and see whats behind it without fully understanding whats in there, but that just makes your decision even harder. That’s kind of how I have been feeling the past few weeks trying to get my head wrapped around these things. With so much information out there about these technologies you may argue that it is not hard learn any one of them well. I agree with that, in fact I am not going to try to teach you about these technologies unless I find a gaping void somewhere. The complex part comes when you are trying to learn about these technologies together and/or how they are linked to each other. This all started from a conversation I had with Colin Jack  in reference to the above posts, which by the way were not the only discussion in blog land on the topic, we decided a road-map of some sort would be a good idea for people that are new to these “New Era Development Tools”. 

A disclaimer before we begin though. I am not an expert at any of these technologies, as such I welcome comments, criticism and just good ole’ corrections for anything I post that may be misleading or wrong. What I am though is a software developer that wants to understand and learn these technologies and principals and put them into practice developing software. So again, a little background. I am a Developer/Project Manager/many more hats for a small manufacturing company in Oklahoma. Our development team consists of 2-3 people at any given point. We have successfully developed and deployed several line of business applications over the past several years using C# and Rhockford Lhotka’s CSLA Business Objects. Now I know a lot of people embracing these new technologies don’t like CSLA but it works for us and the new version of the framework is going to play even nicer with these new technologies. Two months ago I didn’t even know what TDD (Test Driven Development) stood for let alone how to do it. But I got some books, did some research and I understand WHY we should do it and as awkward as it seems we are putting it in practice on a daily basis now.

This will be the first in a series of posts where I show you the “Roadmap” that I am taking to learn these technologies and make them work together. As I said above, I am by no means an expert on these topics, but I am learning and hopefully you will be learning as well. I will start at the bottom of these Building Blocks and work my way to the top. I may also add more blocks in the middle somwhere based on things learned on the way up.