Can you write an object oriented program?

At TheServerSide.COM an interesting article was published:  Java Succumbing to .NET in my Organization Alltough to my feeling, the article really is about tooling, some commentators manage to bend the discussion and suggest that .Net programmers are worse object oriented programmers because of the wizards made available by Microsoft in Visual Studio. Personally I do not believe that to be right, but I suggest to have that discussion over there.

What interests me is how those great object oriented programmers got their skills. What books did they read, what sites do they visit? Anyway, here are some sources that helped me, but I do not consider myself being "Great":

Books:

• Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Alan McKean, ISBN 0201379430
• Object-Oriented Design Heuristics by Arthur J. Riel,ISBN 020163385X
• Design Patterns Explained : A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design by Alan Shalloway and James Trott, ISBN 0321247140

Articles:

• Intro's to the terminology
  • Structural Modeling and Analysis
  • Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
• Basic principles:
  • The Open Closed Principle
  • The Liskov Substitution Principle
  • The Dependency Inversion Principle
  • The Interface Segregation Principle
  • Granularity
  • Stability
  • The Single Responsibility Principle
  • Principles and Patterns
• Quality metrics:
  • Object Oriented Metrics
  • Metrics for Object-Oriented Software Engineering
  • A Validation Of Object-Oriented Design Metrics As Quality Indicators
  • Applying and Interpreting Object Oriented Metrics
• Patterns:
  • Huston Design Patterns

websites:

• Object Mentor
• Martin Fowler
• Wirfs-Brock Associates

Of course, reading a lot of articles about programming itself, downloading code and analyzing it wil get you further too, but above are links to books, articles and websites from which I acquired a deeper understanding of the subject. Reading code alone doesn't do the trick, by reading the above and then looking at code you will start to learn why things are done the way they are, or how things have been done but could have been done better.

Of course, you might have a list of your own, so put it in the comments.

Put an “N” in front of it, or add “.NET” to the back

We can not deny Java having a flourishing open source community. But .Net has it's counterparts to.

Sometimes they are pretty easy to find. Just add an "N" to the front of the java projectname, or add .NET to the back:

 Some samples:

• Hibernate <-> NHibernate
• FOP <-> NFOP
• Cruisecontrol <-> Cruisecontrol.NET
• Ant <-> NAnt
• Spring <-> Spring.NET

Automatic builds with visual studio 6.0

At my work, we’re currently implementing an automatic build environment with visual studio 6.0 .
Following article put me on track:

Automated Builds in DevStudio, or the Night Build Scenario

We used the simple command line options syntax with Nant.

Learning C++

While updating an application from visual studio 6.0 to Visual Studio.NET 2003, I think I have discovered a new way of learning C++, allthough somewhat expensive it really gets your hands dirty:

• Install Visual Studio 6.0
• Install Visual Studio .NET 2003
• Get yourself a copy of the C++ standard
• Write a program in C++ using the 6.0 version, writing as few code as possible
• Import the project in the .NET version
• Compile the program
• Using the standard, try to explain every compilation error

Success…