Martin Fowler asks: Is design dead?
No, says Fowler. But he argues that continuous integration and testing makes refactoring possible. Which means changing your design late in the project isn’t always a catastrophe.
Continuous Integration with Visual C++ and COM talks about making this work with MS tools. And Joel Spolsky (with his strong MS background) is also a friend of daily builds.
Building from inside an IDE (like Visual Studio or Delphi) is fast for the single developer. But how does an entire team get fast releases and built-in testing? Unit-tests are great, but unless they are extremely easy to run they won’t be used.
Running builds from external tools like CruiseControl or Finalbuilder is possible and not very difficult. Also, both VS and Delphi has commandline compilers and can integrate external tools with the IDE.
Thank you Kyle Cordes, for telling me about Finalbuilder.
But will developers think it’s worth it? What we are looking for is The Simplest Thing That Might Possibly work. Like someone said on the WikiWikiWeb: Don’t build a lot of amazing superstructure, don’t do anything fancy, just put it in.
Tomorrow I’ll learn more firsthand. We will spend the whole day discussing tools and workflow for a project where the existing codebase is in Delphi.
Something I personally find invaluable for refactoring is visualizing existing code. Not necessarily full-roundtrip-model-driven wonder tools – I just want to step back and SEE the whole picture sometimes. For Delphi users, Modelmaker is an excellent modeling tool.
Here is a new Bruce Eckel interview. Obviously a very creative person, it was interesting to learn a little about how he got started.
Eckel on testing:
Hope is not a strategy. That is, you need to have some kind of testing and automation built into your project so that at any time you can do a build; if it gets all the way through, you know that everything is okay, but if it doesn’t, you are pointed right at the problem.
Link via DailyPython. Naturally, Eckel is a great Python fan. He says it expanded how he thinks about programming.
Greg does even better dinking and dunking today. 
Some women I know shouldn’t read this. And others already have.
Plenty of heartless bitches around. And I like that… maybe I am a pervert?