This is my first post in this new year and was thinking about a topic to write on. Lately I have been working on varied things that flexes the brain muscles and things which I haven't done before. So a lot of learning and some unlearning this new year. One of the big issue which most people faces is learning to learn!.So, today I will share my experience of how I go about learning a technology, a skill or anything you want. The first and foremost thing is the motivation. This thing is very personal...
With support for Windows XP coming to an end on the 8th April 2014 and IE6 standing in so many people’s way of migration, what better time to start taking the leap to a more modern browser? Microsoft have teamed up with Camwood, Citrix Systems and Quest Software, all application compatibility experts, to help jump-start your move. Join the road shows being organized around the UK between Feb and April to learn more about the technical challenges faced by departments and how you can get around it....
An interesting discussion popped up on Twitter between myself, Steve Rogalsky, Terry Bunio, Mike Iwasiow, David Alpert, and some others around using hours as a software estimating unit of measure. Steve’s been reading the book Beyond the Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and blogged about his stance on using hours for sizing work items. In a nutshell Goldratt offers the following arguments: Asking someone for a timeframe to complete a task puts their image in jeopardy PMs will always try to squeeze whatever...
I have recently been turned on to the world of microcontrollers while doing some hobby development. Here is the first “real” program I have written with the Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad development tool. Check it out…$4.30 to get a development board with 2 devices and a USB connection to your Windows PC for programming and debugging. It’s a lot of fun…especially if you enjoy bit-twiddling! The MSP430 processors specialize in low power operations. They accomplish this by enabling peripherals...
After reading this you should be able to Identify the functions of LAN connectivity hardware Install, configure, and differentiate between network devices such as NAIC’s, hubs, bridges, switches, routers, and gateways Explain the advanced features of a switch and understand popular switching techniques, including VLAN management Explain the purposes and properties of routing Describe common IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols NICs (Network Interface Cards) Are connectivity devices that enable a workstation,...
We’ve used dbdeploy.net on a number of projects and have found it to be a useful tool, especially around CI environments. We recently started a Windows Azure project that uses SQL Server and discovered that DbDeploy.Net didn’t work. There have been a few nagging issues with DbDeploy.Net as well, like the lack of support for recursive script directories, and when we looked into the code base, we discovered that it’s not really written to modern software development standards, and that getting it there...
In the New Testament in Luke 4:23 Jesus speaks of a proverb, “Physician, Heal Thyself.” What, you may ask, does this have to do with being a good developer or a good ScrumMaster? In my experience, it has quite a bit to do with it, actually, and recently, it’s had far more meaning to me than it used to have in the past. In large part, my own increased awareness has stemmed from reading Lyssa Adkins fantastic book, “Coaching Agile Teams.” My Command and Control Roots My dad owns several independent...
I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to follow and cover Microsoft, both in terms of its announcements at the show, and those of its competitors. From that standpoint, and since Microsoft announced that this year’s CES would be its last, I attended again this year and I think it was the best CES Microsoft’s had since I started attending. But the reasons for that are unexpected and surprising. Let me give you a little more context and explain why. Microsoft has, since 1998, delivered the kickoff...
The West Palm Beach Developer Group is off to a good start in 2012 with our special IASA Architecture event on January 24th, 7:00 PM. Microsoft’s Architect Wayne Filin-Matthews will be our speaker on Enterprise Software and Infrastructure Architecture Best Practices. This topic is unique in value as most content will be a reflection of Wayne’s personal experience having successfully helped a multitude of customers with his acquired tacit knowledge of Architecture. To register for this FREE event...
After reading this chapter you should be able to Identify organizations that set standards for networking Describe the purpose of the OSI model and each of its layers Explain specific functions belonging to each OSI model layer Understand how two network nodes communicate through the OSI model Discuss the structure and purpose of data packets and frames Describe the two types of addressing covered by the OSI model Networking Standards Organizations What are standards? Standards are documented agreements...
Software Engineering is the rare field that produces a product that is never consumed nor decays. A working piece of software will last forever as long as there is functioning hardware on which to run it. I once attended a class where a student honestly said that the act of writing software made him feel "immortal".But most programs (thankfully) don't last forever. Why? Because their quality is so poor. Businesses often treat software like a disposable product because the act of maintaining it is...
Tech year 2012 is upon us!Who else more than the IT professionals need to constantly catch up after the latest features, new tools, technologies, software releases or just keep educating themselves?This is all not new to any seasoned developer, administrator or any other IT person. Luckily, Microsoft realizes this does keep many people up at night and as a result we are fortunate to have several resources for at our disposal this year to alleviate the stress levels.Namely, these are as follows:Microsoft...
In my quest to improve speed with developing software I have been investigating how to put as much as possible to the keyboard. This has opened a world of shortcuts. Today I thought I would blog about the top 5 shortcuts that I didn’t know about before that I have found useful. These are shortcuts that I haven’t seen to many people use, see how many you know… 1… Selects the Address Bar Alt + D Most useful when you are in a Web Browser and want to change the url address. 2… Move active window to other...
Happy New Year! I am excited to be speaking at the first meeting in 2012 for the Tampa Bay Windows Phone 7 User Group As usual at Tampa WP7UG there is a jump start session for beginners before the meeting: 5:30PM An Intimate intro to WP7 Development with a local MVP Kevin Wolf in room 1, or a work session in the main room. Come on by early to hangout with other developers or attend the intro sessions. Here is the description of my presentation starting at 6:30PM: Live Tiles, Toasts and Push Notifications...
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting…...
I read Dave Rosenberg’s recent article on CNET entitled “What you should do in 2012: Start a company”, which focussed on interacting with venture capitalists to raise money. I think this is jumping the gun a bit though. The reality is that you don’t need VCs to run, or even start, a company. You also don’t need to quit your day job to do it, or hire employees right away, or put up huge capital to start it. An Idea that Provides Value…or Don’t Be an Underpants Gnome The most important thing you need...
I recently accepted to do a review of “The Learn Microsoft Visual C# book 2010” by John Paul Mueller. I was in two minds on whether I really wanted to read this book – in it’s description it says it is targeting fundamentals of modern programming with Visual C#, but I wasn’t sure how fundamental it would be and since I have been working with C# for a while now, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my while. After going through a few of the chapters of the book I would say this really targets very basic...
At http://www.microsoft.com/se... Microsoft have a made available a free Security Inteliigence Report.Here is an interesting note about the report: "At RSA Conference Europe 2011 today, Microsoft Corp. released the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 11 (SIRv11), which found that less than 1 percent of exploits in the first half of 2011 were against zero-day vulnerabilities — software vulnerabilities that are successfully exploited before the vendor has published a...
2011 has been a fantastic year for so many different reasons, and its laid the groundwork for a fantastic 2012 to come! Online Business Systems In February I started with Online Business Systems, a technology and business consulting company based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba but with offices in Calgary, Edmonton, Portland, Minneapolis, and Toronto. Coming to online was the best decision I’ve ever made in my career. The mentorship and nurturing, the opportunities and support, and the culture of the organization...
Greetings, this is my first geeks with blogs posting. so forgive me if it looks so sloppy. Purpose: To calculate additional shipping fees for a shopping cart full of items based on product name in Magento 1.4. We will assume the same shipping rate for all services here. Most items in our store are the same size and weight, except for a few items that are a little larger. We will identify those large items by name and add some amount onto them. First we shall start off with a free open source Magento...
Finally getting around to getting this thing off the ground. My goal for this blog is to talk about my ongoing learning/discovery of technology related to Microsoft’s .NET framework. On occasion I anticipate exploring tangential topics and the sociological/anthropological aspect of what of issues professional software developers encounter on a day-to-day basis...
I was recently inspired to write on this topic after two client experiences that demonstrated serious misconceptions about the role that software architecture plays in producing quality software. After performing an assessment of a mid-sized company, it was obvious that they were in dire need of a good software architect to design and maintain the design of the application that they were in the process of planning. After making the recommendation, the CIO began to explain that they had already chosen...
Spinning as described in my previous article is all about flow. Its premise is: flow can emerge when work is partitioned in small, evenly sized chunks processed in a smooth manner. There is a constant input of requests to the development team. A backlog is filled with strategically important requirements, support is reporting bugs, feedback requires changes, management wants to see ideas realized on short notice. Under these circumstances any plan becomes obsolete within a day or two. Or a lot of...
Everyone has an opinion. When you embark upon your first real job as a programmer you will find this out very quickly. I have found that software developers can be some of the most opinionated and dogmatic people you will ever meet. This certainly is not a bad thing. However, young programmers will need to cultivate the ability to make their own minds up when it comes to how to write software. There are those who start out in a corporate environment where the styles and conventions used have already...
A friend of mine works for a large bank… about a year and a half ago they needed a new system developed for their division. They went through the normal process of using one of the recommended service providers to develop the system and this was their experience, which is still typical with most institutions I know… For the first few months development of the system seemed to be progressing along fine. They had meetings, business analysts put things on paper and the developers nodded their heads...
Agility needs to get onto the next level – that´s what I tried to explain in my previous articles. After a reality check – what´s missing from Agile practice? –, and some general musings about how a next level of Agility could look like, here now some very tangible suggestions. Crank up the frequency Current Agile practice is suffering from too little attention to Acceptance. To change this, very, very clear Acceptance dates need to be set. Acceptance can only get into a real pulling mode, if dates...
This is a strangest error I have come across whilst working with SharePoint 2010, the full error is this. [12/20/2011 5:29:10 PM] Warning: [WSS_Content] The operation did not proceed far enough to allow RESTART. Reissue the statement without the RESTART qualifier. RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally. The error message was written to the file restore.log found in the SharePoint backup folder, it seems that the following keyword in TSQL caused the error. IF EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM master..sysdatabases...
Previously I blogged about Lync for mobile for the Windows Phone, this software is now available for the iPhone as well. Microsoft Lync 2010 for iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/us/...
In my previous article I came to a couple of conclusions based on the reality of software development, or should I say “the nature of software development”? Here are the – to me - undeniable facts of what our industry is all about: Customers hardly know, what they want. Any specification is inherently fuzzy and incomplete. What fits the customer´s needs can only be determined by actually trying it out. The customer can only recognize a running piece of software as acceptable. Because customers hardly...
Tell Us Once (TUO) is the award-winning, cross-government programme that lets people inform central government and local authorities just once of a birth or death. By March 2012 it will be in service in over 95% of councils in England, Scotland and Wales. It has provided a permanent solution to the long-standing and frustrating issue of people having to notify the government multiple times. Several years ago, research showed that people had to make up to 44 contacts when reporting a death to government...
Let´s get real about software development: It´s never going to be a quietly flowing river. Never. And that´s why the current approaches to software development like XP, Scrum, and Kanban will always cause pain. Their basic assumption is you should be able to isolate a team for a while to work on features. Leave it alone during an iteration or a sprint to complete a set of features, or at least sit still until the current feature is done. Certainly that´s what we all want as developers: being able...
I've been at GeeksWithBlogs for 6 years now, and over the years its been great to see new people join the GWB community. I wanted to highlight a few blogs that started up this year that you might want to add to your RSS feed.Simon Cooperhttp://geekswithblogs... has some crazy deep, low level type posts on .NET code which I'm sure some people would think is fantastic. But what I really like is the insight into RedGate. Simon works for RedGate software, and shares experiences...
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own...
Well, after reading the following article, I figured the case Paul Hiles makes is not bad. Not every one wants or needs DI, and granted, in many cases moving from a "IoC Container used as a Service Locator" solution to a "real dependency injection" solution might just be not worth it, I believe that it's a better structure, especially if you're writing from scratch. http://www.devtrends.co.uk/... I'm not writing from scratch, and...
Today's deal of the day from Microsoft Press at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is Managing Projects with Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System "Get the practical reference for using Visual Studio Team System in your software development lifecycle—and maximize project success. Designed for software project managers, this book offers straightforward product information and expert insights for collaborating with architects, developers, and testers in one integrated development environment."This...
Overview C++ AMP is a GPGPU API – it allows you to define functions (kernels) that take some input, perform an expensive calculation on the GPU and return the output to CPU. GPU supports fast calculative operations across many SIMD-like cores - NVidia Tesla supports 512 cores compared to the paltry 10 cores available on the CPU today - even Intel's Knights Corner will only support 60 cores next year. Suitable only for certain classes of problems (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others...
Let me clarify what I mean by “3 role” environment. When looking at the division of roles with products, solutions or environments, it has been very normal to break it down into IT Pros (Admins), Developers and End Users. And many approach SharePoint in the same style. Does it fit? Sure. Is it the most effective approach? HECK NO! Let’s look at it piece by piece. Now the question is where do we start? We need to redefine this. In all cases leaving it as IT Pros, Developers and End Users is too broad....
Is this blog post worth your time? It’s not challenging setting up the Load Test Rig in the Cloud, it’s more challenging to convince enterprises to embrace the cloud. Not all enterprises will accept their business critical applications being profiled from a VM hosted outside their network. Though through Windows Azure Connect you can join the Cloud hosted Role to the on premise domain effectively forcing the domain policies on the external VM but how many enterprises will authorize you to do this?...
On November 28th, 2011 I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the St. Louis .NET User Group on my experiences developing software for the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform. Having been at PDC in 2009 for the announcement of Azure and been able to work on a number of Azure projects since that time I frequently see many Azure talks that are either: A) too high level and marketing oriented as they never tell you anything important or B) too low level and focused on a specific feature that...
Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig. What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute...
A few days ago I was browsing a particular commerical web site, the site crashed and I encountered the "White Screen of Death". The detailed dump showed me what the site was using:zendMySqlPHPMageMagen... all this detailed information of use to a hacker, the copyright on Magento cited a date of 2009. Does this means that out of date software was in use?There is a more basic point - in your site please ensure that fatal errors are trapped and redirected to a page that gives away no information...
I’ve always been a more or less active fan of Star Trek. During the construction phase of my house I started coding a GUI for controlling the house which has an EIB. Just for fun I designed a version inspired by the LCARS design used in Star Trek TNG and showed this to my wife. I showed her several designs before but this was the only one, she really liked. So I decided to go on with this. I started a C# WinForms application. The software runs on a wall mounted Shuttle Barebone-PC. First plan was...
The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary. IT interests intentionally live in the past. On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it. Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder...
(DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We...
Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did....
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software and its client software, such as Microsoft Lync 2010, enable your users to connect in new ways and to stay connected, regardless of their physical location. Lync 2010 and Lync Server 2010 bring together the different ways that people communicate in a single client interface, are deployed as a unified platform, and are administered through a single management infrastructure. Workload Description IM and presence Instant messaging (IM) and presence...
UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback and comments. I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations. I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping. According to Wikipedia...
Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major businesses critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, and the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments...
It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward,...