Wagnerblog

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having grown up in East Germany and defected in 1979, I have  a special connection with this symbol of oppression. To most of us living behind this wall it really seemed insurmountable. For starters, unlike the West Berlin side where people had [...]

Under the best of circumstances, Agile Methodologies – especially SCRUM – puts the development team smack dab in the center of the process and has the entire life cycle revolve around it. That’s why so many programmers love Agile. But even organizations that, for whatever reason, are not able to support a 100% Agile environment [...]

Recently I was asked “ What technology do you recommend Linq or NHibernate” ?  My knee jerk reaction was “ It depends – potentially neither”. But that’s not good enough as an answer. The feeling that I owed a better explanation led me to this post.
Let’s start with some basics. Object Relational Modeling has been [...]

Sometimes I wonder if Scott Adams is wiser than he is given credit for.

I like it, but boy it requires a shift in thinking and has a learning curve since you need to practically relearn how to do everything on the web page. No more controls.
It suffers a little bit from RoR envy.
It will probably take some time before the best ways to do certain things in this [...]

This is so correct and true to life it is scary.

As a programmer / consultant I always work on improving my skills. Except for the past year or so. I coasted a little bit. Consequently I am faced with two technologies that I need to study up. MS MVC and Silverlight. My personal feeling is that Silverlight will grow into the larger market over [...]

Wow, I really have been leading a pretty sheltered life as a consultant. There is a toolset I have used for a number of years that has predictably delivered results. When it comes to projects where you deliver or you dont eat its pretty important that your tools work. Along the way I was fortunate [...]

The NY Times has a nice article describing how German companies deal with the economic downturn (check the comments as well !) .
It touches on some of the aspects I previously brought up. The notion that in Europe, especially in Germany, you find a greater sense of social collectivism. Bad choice of words maybe. But [...]

I grew in a country where little kids were educated in the idea that a revolution is a good thing. That capitalism is bad and that there are times when the working class just has to stand up and take over. I dont advocate this notion but I wonder if there will come a time [...]