Ben, Mark and Andy

Looks like Ben has moved his blog to Wordpress. Welcome back to blogging Ben! He contributed a lot of the demo code to my book and is a top developer with a lot to say - when he gets the chance to say it: BBCW don't half keep him busy, as do the drinking holes of Romford.

We shared the Bitarray hosting for our old blogs, so it looks like it's goodbye to all that.

Ben mentions nSpectre which is an open source project built by another ex-colleague Mark. His blog is here. nSpectre is cool. It started out as a basic idea to provide a reusable implementation of the 'Specification' pattern in Eric Evan's excellent book - Domain driven Design - and has really come up with the goods allowing specifications (or validation logic) for an application to be used declaratively. Very handy for directly translating written specifications and of course in terms of re-use. Mark's also one of the brainiest blokes I know.

Andy is also an avid blogger and is doing a lot with WPF - he's also interested in NAnt, CI and all that hence the connection. We were supposed to meet up here in Reading last week, but failed! Sorry Andy. He has a good post on the environment here which made me laugh. I sort of take it for granted that the facilities and so on are top quality - the BBC was really good too - but it's easy to forget nightmare offices. At one previous place I worked the only option for lunch was anything from the dodgy sandwich section of the local garage. I know - you're thinking "Hey, that's OK" and you'd be right. For a day or two, maybe a couple of weeks. Not for several months, every lunchtime. Trust me ;)