Tag | ALM Posts
Yesterday's post about A Bad Day at Work actually had an addendum to it. There were apparently a bunch of guys on ice skates last night competing in some sport way the hell and gone over on the other side of the valley, and enough people couldn't live without seeing them that they had all major arteries heading west honked. I mean honked... the traffic guy reported the 101 had 16 miles of backup... yikes. Since I worked downtown for a number of years, my fallback is to cut across the city on surface ...
I’m thinking maybe I should have used Time Crunching 101 as the title instead… or maybe ‘Duh Duffy, where have you been? Everyone knows that!” Ok, so maybe you won’t actually learn how to travel through time from this post but you will learn how to cram more learning into one day. We all know you can’t make it to every conference, every presentation, or every training session. The good news is that many of those events make their content available to either watch online or to download for off-line ...
Hey Guys~ So the second day of the week starts, and we were all set for coming sessions on : - IS & Strategy and, - Changing Geo-politics & Business Environment We did our daily chores, rushed for breakfast, and reached Auditorioum, almost on time. IS & Strategy session was quite informative and interactive, and the prof. gave lot of examples, and it really gives us solid understanding by relating things with examples. Then goes the lunch, but the IS session over shoot for 15 minutes ...
At the end of my visit to 8th Light Justin Martin was kind enough to give me a ride to the train station; for my train back to O’Hare. Just before he left he asked me an interesting question which I then posted to twitter: Liam McLennan: . @JustinMartinM asked what I think is the most important attributes of craftsmen. I said, "desire to learn and humility". What's yours? 6:25 AM Apr 17th via TweetDeck several people replied with excellent contributions: Alex Hung: @liammclennan I think kaizen sums ...
Recently, on a software development forum, a person who shall remain nameless posted the following Hi, Is there good material available on the net/elsewhere for the following topics? 1. Transitioning an Organisation to Scrum 2. Scrum Team Dynamics Thanks Name Withheld to protect the guilty Of course one of the first answers the nameless one got was a link to LetMeGoogleThatForYou http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Transi... Here's a quick checklist to follow before asking geeks of ...
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about the new features in Visual Studio 2010. Check out the MSDN Events page and find out when the talented folks of the Developer & Evangelism group will be visiting your city to prove to you that /*Life Runs On Code*/. I’ll be attending the Raleigh event June 2, 2010 from 1:00 - 5:00 PM. North Carolina State University, Jane S. McKimmon Conference Center 1101 Gorman St Raleigh North Carolina 27606 United States From the Raleigh Event page: Event Overview ...
Hey, I need some advice/help, now I’ve been writing on this blog for a few years, I don’t blog a great deal in comparison to many of my peers and my blog doesn’t get a massive number of hits, BUT I seem to get a fair share of comment spammers!! I have image verification on the comments and I have put an Akismet API key into the Geekswithblogs settings, but I still get a bunch of spam comments. They could almost be real, until you see the link going off to some dating site or casino crap. What does ...
For this third tutorial, we'll be introducing users new to NHibernat to basic object relationships, starting with a simple many-to-one relationship. I decided that it would make sense to at least get the readers through some basic relationship mapping (including varieties of parent/child and many to many relationships) before diverging into UI, since most folks are looking for enough to bootstrap themsevles into using NHibernate, and this almost always means some kind of relation between their objects. ...
So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool. But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ? The answer is not really clear-cut. There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability. The first of these is obvious and quantifiable. Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and ...
Lately I’ve ran into situations where I had to change elements or had to request a value in the DOM from Silverlight. jLight, which was introduced in an earlier article, can help with that. jQuery offers great ways to change CSS during runtime. Silverlight can access the DOM, but it isn’t as easy as jQuery. All examples shown in this article can be looked at in this online demo. The code can be downloaded here. Part 1: The easy stuff Selecting and changing properties is pretty straight forward. Setting ...
It was time of my first onsite client assignment on SharePoint. Client had one server production environment. They wanted to upgrade the topology with completely new SharePoint Farm of three servers. So, the task was to move whole MOSS 2007 stuff to the new server environment without impacting data. The last three words “… without impacting data…” were actually putting pressure on my head. Moreover SSP was required to move because additional information has been added for users apart from AD import. ...
So I have been delving into F# more and more and thought the best way to learn the language is to write something useful. I have been meaning to get some more Silverlight knowledge (up to now I have mainly been doing WPF) so I came up with a really simple project that I can actually use at work. Simply put – I often get support calls from clients wanting new activation codes. One of our main app’s was written in VB6 and had its own “security” where it would require about a 45 character sequence for ...
I’m proud to announce that two Microsoft employees, Sarika Calla and Kevin Halverson, who works on the Visual Studio Product Team will be visiting various User Groups and Companies in Arkansas and Texas! Bios: Sarika Calla – Speaking about a Woman’s perspective at Microsoft, this natively born Indian holds a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and has been with Microsoft for the past 8 years. Sarika is now a Team Lead on the IDE Team. (pic is Redmond sacalla mthumb.jpg) Kevin Halverson ...
Almost two years ago, I wrote about a Visual Studio macro that allows you to change the Target Framework version of all projects in a solution. If you don’t know, the Target Framework version is what tells the compiler which version of the .NET Framework to compile against (more information is available here) and can be set to one of the following values: .NET Framework 2.0 .NET Framework 3.0 .NET Framework 3.5 .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile .NET Framework 4.0 .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile ...
When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBooks reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately afterwards, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering ...
Recently I ran into an issue with a project failing to build on an automated build server using CruiseControl. When I looked into the build log I saw that the Post-Build project was failing with the error message: "error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Post-Build Event..." This was most frustrating especially since the solution was building without issue on my local development environment. The Post-Build project was a C++ project that basically called several batch files ...
Sam Abraham gave a great presentation, “MVC2 – Do it your way in VS 2010”, at our monthly ArcSig meeting on 04/20/2010 at Global Response. The interest in Sam’s talk was immense, we almost run out of seats. The audience got an in-depth view and walkthrough of the Model View Controller functionality in Visual Studio 2010 with detailed code examples. Sam answered many user questions about practical applications in MVC. Free soft drinks and pizza kept the participants energized during the whole presentation ...
I was asked today about how much data an average Retail Link analyst (Walmart vendor) would consume. I thought I would write this small post for future reference. Of course this vastly depends on the amount of skus, how long you want to archive data, and if you want store level sales. Most reports take up very little space. Most times when you download a report (total sales per sku for last week), you will overwrite the previous week’s report. However, most users will take the data inside their downloaded ...
Getting my geek on… I have decided to call the products VS.10 (Visual Studio 2010), TP.10 (Test Professional 2010), and TFS.10 (Team Foundation Server 2010) Thanks Neno Loje. What's new in Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2010? Focusing on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) ALM-related parts: Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 NEW: IntelliTrace® (aka the historical debugger) NEW: Architecture Tools New Project Type: Modeling Project UML Diagrams UML Use Case Diagram UML Class Diagram UML Sequence ...
I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to ...
On Monday I was at Didit for my first ever craftsmanship visit. Didit seem to occupy a good part of a non-descript building in Rockville Centre Long Island. Since I had arrived early from Seattle I had some time to kill, so I stopped at the Rockville Diner on the corner of N Park Ave and Sunrise Hwy. I thoroughly enjoyed the pancakes and the friendly service. After walking to the Didit office I met Rik Dryfoos, the Didit Engineering Manager who organised my visit, and got the introduction to Didit ...
In this Issue: CrocusGirl, Giorgetti Alessandro(-2-), smartyP, Pete Brown, David Poll, David Anson, and Bill Reiss. Shoutouts: Yasser Makram has a post up discussing Human Centered ALM with Telerik TeamPulse and Team Foundation Server. I saw this demo'd at DevConnnections and it definitely deserves a look. Shawn Wildermuth posted his materials from DevConnections all on one post: Back from DevConnections with SourceCode Shawn Wildermuth also posted an Updated RIA Services + MVVM Example Laurent Bugnion ...
I was spending a lovely day this last weekend watching my sons play outside in one of the better weekends we've had here in Saint Louis for quite some time, and whilst watching them and making sure no limbs were broken or eyes poked out with sticks and other various potential injuries, I was perusing (in the correct sense of the word) this month's MSDN magazine to get a sense of the latest VS2010 features in both IDE and in languages. When I got to the back pages, I saw a wonderful article by David ...
A coworker of mine ran into this error recently, while migrating a document library from SharePoint 2003 to 2007: “A WebPartZone can only exist on a page which contains a SPWebPartManager. The SPWebPartManager must be placed before any WebPartZones on the page.” He saw this when he tried to see the All Documents view for the library. After looking into it, we figured out what had happened. He was migrating documents using the Explorer View in SharePoint. He had copied the contents of the library ...
Lately, I exchanged some arguments with Derick Bailey about some details of the red-green-refactor cycle of the Test-driven development process. In short, the issue revolved around the fact that it’s not enough to have a test red or green, but it’s also important to have it red or green for the right reasons. While for me, it’s sufficient to initially have a NotImplementedException in place, Derick argues that this is not totally correct (see these two posts: Red/Green/Refactor, For The Right Reasons ...
DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, ...
I have a pretty clear stance on posting personal information in my blogs. I tend to avoid it almost instinctively. Part of that is because I am a somewhat private person. And the other is because I know how easy it is for personal information to be gathered and collected from sources such as blogs. So, this has remained a tech only blog for me. I've only posted topics mostly related to issues I have encountered at work. In a way this blog is a 'bookmark' for me. If I post something here and run into ...
I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going ...
*Moved to: Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum TeamsHaving a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
I’ve been doing the whole programming thing for awhile and reading and watching some of the best in the business. I have come to notice that the really great developers do a few things that (I think) makes them great. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I am one of these few. I still struggle with doing some of the things that makes one great at development. Coincidently, many of these things also make you a better person period. Believe That Guidance Is Better Than Answers This is one I ...
Arriving at JFK, at dawn, is beautiful. From above 1,000ft I can see no crime, poverty or ugliness – just the dark orange sunrise-through-smog. The Atlantic appears calm, and I take that as a good sign. Today is the first day of my software craftsmanship tour. I will be visiting three of the shining lights of the software industry over five days, exchanging ideas and learning. Arriving on the red eye from Seattle I feel like hell. My lips, not used to the dry air, are cracked and bleeding. I get ...
*Moved to: Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM doneToday is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM. We have had TFS 2010 Beta 2 and RC in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only joy, so moving to the RTM on launch day gives me warm and fuzzy feelings.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Huge news for my company and me especially. http://www.imaginets.com/ne... With the acquisition we become a very significant player in the Microsoft ALM space. This increases our scale significantly and also our knowledgebase. We now have a 2 Regional Directors and a pile of MS MVP’s. The timing couldn’t be more perfect since the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 is TODAY!! Oh, and we aren’t done with announcements today… More later. ...
I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery ...
In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Roboblob, Laurent Bugnion, Timmy Kokke, Michael Sync(-2-), Victor Gaudioso, and Bill Reiss. Brought to you from a tiny table in my no-tell-motelTM in 'Vegas AKA "cheaper than anywhere else" and the WiFi is free and smokin'... From SilverlightCream.com: Sync your Silverlight out-of-browser application data without service but with Dropbox Rénald Nollet is in good company (Walt Ritscher) because he's demo'ing synching OOB apps with dropbox. Unit Testable WCF Web Services ...
Introduction With the recent news about Silverlight on the Windows Phone and all the great Out-Of-Browser features in the upcoming Silverlight 4 you almost forget Silverlight is a browser plugin. It most often runs in a web browser and often as a control. In many cases you need to communicate with the browser to get information about textboxes, events or details about the browser itself. To do this you can use JavaScript from Silverlight. Although Silverlight works the same on every browser, JavaScript ...
Last October I learnt my company wanted to put together a new blog/social networking policy. I decided that out of respect for my employer I wouldn’t blog until this was sorted out. This was perhaps was an easy decision to make as I was separating from my ex-wife at the time and frankly needed the time to concentrate on other things. So now the company has a brand new policy and I’m back into the dating game I thought I would blow off the cobwebs and get back to what I enjoy doing. First and foremost ...
One of my colleague and friend, Robin is playing and struggling with the ASP.NET MVC 2 on a project these days while I’m struggling with a annoying client. Since it’s his first time to use ASP.NET MVC he was meetings with a lot of problem and I was very happy to share my experience to him. Yesterday he asked me when he attempted to insert a <br /> element into his page he found that the page was rendered like this which is bad. He found his <br /> was shown as a part of the string rather ...
I'm going to be in 'Vegas for the Launch on Monday, I'm not sure what time I'm getting in on Sunday, but I'm staying over Monday night as well, so if you're going to be around in that time-frame, send me an email! Bummer to not be there for Silverlight on Tuesday, but hey... watching Scott Guthrie is always worth the drive :) ...
Overview of Visual Studio ALM Whitepapers by Microsoft Overview Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance Installation, Configuration & Administration Team Foundation Installation Guide for Visual Studio Team System 2010 Administration Guide for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory TFS Integration Platform Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper Requirements Visual Studio 2010 ...
*Moved to: Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
*Moved to: Guidance - Branching for each SprintThere are a lot of developers using version control these days, but a feature of version control called branching is very poorly understood and remains unused by most developers in favour of Labels. Most developers think that branching is hard and complicated. Its not! What is hard and complicated is a bad branching strategy. Just like a bad software architecture a bad branch architecture, or one that is not adhered to can prove fatal to a project. We ...
Sometime you’re searching for something forever and when you find it, you realize it was right under your nose. Maybe you were distracted by other things around… or maybe that thing right under your nose was so well hidden that it deserves a blog post… That happened to me a few days ago while using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in my VB.NET application… I thought it was a cool feature and I decided to use it… So there I am adding new settings with “USER” scope and StringCollection as the ...
In an industry segment that nobody is ever 'asleep', I suppose no time is a good time to take SQL Server down for upgrades, and I had forgotten that my host was going to be doing that. Last night about 9pm (Arizona), in the middle of working on a blog post, things started going wonky and I finally realized everything was ok except for SQL Server. I turned in a ticket on it and was reminded about the maintenance schedule... guess I file those away in memory and just assume they'll happen while I'm ...
This is the third post in a series related to build and deployment considerations as I’ve been exploring MVC Portable Areas: #1 – Using Web Application Project to build portable areas #2 – Conventions for deploying portable area static files #3 – Portable area static files as embedded resources In the last post, I walked through a convention for managing static files. In this post I’ll discuss another approach to manage static files (e.g., images, css, js, etc.). With this approach, you *also* compile ...
Last week I made 2 stops to my local game stores and spent a load of cash on a bunch of new retro games for my collection. Here are the recent additions: NES - Mega Man 2 - The Adventures of Bayou Billy - Ducktales - Metal Gear - Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt - Firestorm - Dragon's Lair - Bartman Meets Radioactive Man N64 - Superman 64 - Zelda: Ocarina of Time (in original box, box is in poor condition) Atari - Superman - Adventure - Donkey Kong - Raiders of the Lost Ark Dreamcast - Memory card with ...
Asked by many of my colleagues often enough, I decided to take the plunge and begin blogging. After many attempts to start and long discussions about what I should write about, I decided to give my “buddies” a series of lessons and tidbits to help them understand what it takes to manage a software development project in the real world. Stories of success and failure to keep hope alive. I am formally trained as a developer (BS/CS) and have scattered my code throughout the matrix since 1985 (officially ...
So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for ...
Sherlock Staffing is bringing back the free Pizza/Soda after-meeting social to Fladotnet's West Palm Beach .Net User Group. Group members will have ample time to network and share experiences while enjoying pizza and soda after each meeting. Alex Funkhouser, Sherlock Staffing's President and Chief Talent Agent, is a continuous supporter of the .Net community with Sherlock Staffing maintaining a strong presence in every user group and quickly stepping-in as sponsors to meet any arising community need. ...
Things are slowly coming together – I was able to look at a bit of F# code and intuitively know what it was going to do (yay)… So today I saw a blog post by Bob Palmer on Fibonacci numbers in F# which inspired me to look at bit into recursion. First the C# example… class Program { public static void CountDown(int n) { switch (n) { case 0: Console.WriteLine("End of Count"); break; default: Console.WriteLine(n); CountDown(n-1); break; } } static void Main(string[] args) { CountDown(10); Console.ReadLine(); ...