software
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software
I am fortunate to live on a vast network of trails that start literally in my backyard… there is a trailhead two feet from the end of my driveway. These asphalt trails are plowed in the winter and wind through the backyards and parks, around the lakes, and along the streams of my suburban neighborhood. There are 20+ miles of trails available without ever stepping foot onto a roadway. As I was finishing a run a little over a year ago, it occurred to me to wonder why I was running on the street instead...
Recently I was on a project with no Unit Tests, no Continuous Integration Server, not even a Build. I was asked to deploy the application to a server so that the client could begin using it. (No, we had had no User Acceptance testing either formal or informal, but that's neither here nor there...) I tweeted what I thought was a rhetorical question: "I am deploying an application by pulling the source code, compiling it on my laptop, and copying the DLLs to the server. What's wrong with this picture?"...
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far far away, a developer at Microsoft named Scott Hanselman decided to learn WPF. And so he set out upon the Great BabySmash Experiment. Meanwhile, in another galaxy, a developer at Magenic named Kirstin decided to learn WPF. By this time, the Great BabySmash Experiment had achieved fame far and wide, and so Kirstin downloaded the source code and created DrewbieSmash. Who is Drewbie? Drew is my five-year-old nephew and is very special in many ways. When he was about...
Last I attended a TFS User Group meeting in Minneapolis. Bill Maurer explained how Microsoft used Team Foundation Server to build the next release of Visual Studio. It was really interesting to hear how the development team used TFS to track their own work. The most interesting thing to me was to hear about how TFS is being used to manage Java projects (Not at Microsoft of course!) Previously it had not occurred to me to consider TFS as anything other than a .NET development tool. But, of, course,...
One of the questions that came out of my TFS talk at the Magenic Technology Summit was: How do you go about customizing one of the existing templates provided for TFS, such as MSF Agile? We may want to add new types for Work Items, for example, or add new states that work items can be in. The easiest way to do this is through the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools. If you do not have the Power Tools installed, you can still do this by editing the XML that makes up the...
Mike Eaton, a member of my twitter tribe, is trying to get to know his tweeps better. As part of that, he asks a few questions to get a better understanding of our background. I figured that rather than answer in his comments, I'll post it here instead. Then, I got tagged by Jeff Brand... So the pressure was on!! How old were you when you started programming? Ten years old the first time. 23 the second time. How did you get started in programming? My parents bought a Commodore Vic 20 (they couldn't...
I took Jeff McWherter's suggestion to play around with SubText, and have successfully gotten SubText upgraded and running in VS 2008, .NET 3.5. My environment is the "Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image (Trial)" Virtual PC from Microsoft. Here are the steps that I followed: 1. Download and unzip the latest source code from SourceForge 2. Open Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition and Create a new Team Project (File - New - Team Project). I selected the MSF For...
DMAIC is used to improve processes, and it is to engineers what O-O is to developers: a well known and understood best practice with patterns, anti-patterns, and a common language and toolset. DMAIC is an acronym for five interconnected phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, and is usually an integral part of a company's Six Sigma practice. Pronounced (Duh-May-Ick), it is a data-driven, procedural approach and quality strategy for improving processes- in this case, application performance....