Sketchflow

We're started a project and are now in gather-requirements-phase. I sketched some UI-views for my module and Alex said: great - can you scan them in so we can discuss them with Uwe from Hamburg?
I remembered that I've heard something about Sketchflow which is build into Expression Blend. Sketchflow is a rapid prototyping software which lets you design new UI-sketches very fast. So I surfed to Sketchflow overview and thought "well, I'll give it a try". So I downloaded Expression Blend 3 and a Starterkit with some neat videos. While installing, I watched the first one and was impressed what you can do with that piece of software: build your UI using predefined toolsets, add navigation to your sketched application and even gather feedback from various persons via a Sketchflow-player.
After 3 and a half hours of work, I sketched all paper-sketches into Sketchflow and showed it to Alex and Reinhard. Gosh, they were impressed. Here are two screenshots:

This will be the first screen after a import has finished. They suggested to delete the buttons and integrate the navigation into the colored labels.

This shows how easy it is to create a rich screen in just a few minutes. If you wish, you can even use real data imported into Expression Blend! And best of all: it makes a lot of fun ^^

Pair Programming

Puh, just finished a pair programming-session with Artem. This was hard work!
We started at about 14:00 and wanted to add some unittests for a class Artem wrote. I already reviewed his code, so I knew it quite good. By the way, one result of the review was "where are the unittests?" - so I maneuvered myself in this position. Anyway, good quality-code needs some sacrifices *heroic*
I took the keyboard and Artem the mouse... No, just kidding. He was sitting beside me keeping an eye on my cursor. So we began with the first function and let Visual Studio build a test-stub and an accessor (yes, I love that!) for us. We discussed what to test for this method and I began to write code for it - easy. Not long afterwards, we found the first inconsistency which wasn't visible in the review and in the productive code either. Fixed it and continued. This went on and on, one unittest after the other. We discussed the relevant parts of the code and enhanced a few places.
But as time goes by, I noticed how unconcentrated I was and that I made more and more typos. What a luck that we almost had all unittests we longed for. So we created the rest and finished that session. It was 16:00 and I was exhausted like never before when writing some code.
I must say, that this was hard, but it was worth for it. You can't get such a tight feedback-loop when doing reviews and you can't produce code just by discussing it in a normal meeting. So, pair programming is great but exhausting!