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Recently, a co-worker was talking about how wonderful Spotify was, and I decided to give it a go. I signed up for the ultimate version, because, hey, if you’re going to try something, you should give it a fair shake. I’m also a Pandora One subscriber. The end result is that I’m canceling my Spotify subscription and returning to Pandora. I’ll still use it when I really want to hear a specific song, but probably won’t spend much time in it. You should know that 85% of the time, I’m a “Give me X genre...
I just got back from Build 2011, and rather than spout my own theories (I’ll get to them later), I want to point you at a post by Kieth Elder. Basically, he says that there are two modes of using data, creation and consumption. Metro is for consumption, desktop mode is for creation. I think he’s spot on! Technorati Tags: Windows 8,Metro...
You’ve all seen this team, maybe you’ve even been on this team. I certainly know that I have! What kind of team, you might ask? It’s the team that is simply dysfunctional. Many reasons can exist for a team that isn’t working, and team dysfunction is a complex thing that can’t necessarily be isolated into a simple formula that will always work to make people function well on a team. Cynefin Recently, I attended RallyOn in Boulder with Rally Software Development. This was one of the best user conferences...
An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow...
With the release of Internet Explorer 9 RC the browser looks to be in a usable state. So far, my experience has been positive. However, one area where I am having problems is when people are using the jQueryUI library. Versions older than 1.8 cause IE 9.0 to be unable to drag and drop. This is a real pain, especially at sites like Agile Zen, where dragging and dropping is a primary bit of functionality. Now that IE 9 is a release candidate, we’ll see how quickly these things improve. I expect things...
One of our users was having difficulties with their mac and using some web software. I decided to go peruse the landscape and see how much of a premium people were paying for their macs. I priced out a Dell and a Mac from their websites. I tried to get them as close to the same configuration, from a hardware standpoint, as I could. I found the following: Apple Macbook Pro Dell XPS 17 There are several important differences in the hardware: The mac doesn’t have a blueray player, but the dell does....
In a previous post, I wrote about how to get LDAP authentication working in Collabnet. By default, all LDAP users are put into the Users role on the server. For most purposes, this is just fine, and I don’t have a way to change this. The documentation gives hints that you can add them to other roles, but for now, I don’t have the need. However, adding permissions to different repositories is a different question. To add them, go to the repositories list, select Access Rules and then you can enter...
I promised I’d have a simpler mechanism for rebuilding the database. Below is a complete MSBuild targets file for rebuilding the database from scratch. I don’t know if I’ve explained the rational for this. The reason why you’d WANT to do this is so that each developer has a clean version of the database on their local machine. This also includes the continuous integration environment. Basically, you can do whatever you want to the database without fear, and in a minute or two, have a completely rebuilt...
In part 1, I showed a complicated mechanism for performing a clean database build. There’s an easier way. The easier way is to use the msbuild extension tasks out on codeplex. While you’ll still need to forcibly take the database offline (ALTER DATABASE [mydb] SET OFFLINE WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE), the other msbuild tasks more easily allow you to create and delete the database. Eventually, I’ll post an example. Technorati Tags: MSBuild...
It’s been half a year since my last post. My how time flies. My new years resolution is to post more frequently. After a short stint at a local company, which shall remain nameless, I’m back at Veracity. Overall, Veracity Solutions is one of the best companies I’ve worked for, and I’m relieved to be back. So, this year, I’m going to do the following on my blog: Finish the Agile posts I started (IN MAY!!!). Blog about some code for a logging helper to make debug logging easier. Blog some resharper...
So I’m taking a break from writing about other Agile stuff for a post. :) I’m still going to get back to the other subjects, but this is fun too. Something I’ve done quite a bit of is MSBuild and CI work. I’m experimenting with ways to improve what I’ve done in the past, particularly around database CI. Today, I developed a mechanism for starting from scratch with your database. By scratch, I mean blowing away the existing database and creating it again from a single command line call. I’m a firm...
Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be. Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team. If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs. Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you. Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration. First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope. To do this, they’ll tell...
In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product. Note that I didn’t say about the product itself. Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners. Products only matter in relationship to their customers. If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product....
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult. All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner. Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities. I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers...
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum. The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong. We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile. Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process...
For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it. I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t. I still didn’t understand the concept of a team. I still wanted to tell the team...
I’m going to write my history with Agile here. That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read. Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews. I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early...
So, I was trying to explain to a new team about what an iteration is all about and came up with the following. Basically, this is the template that we use for our iterations. They weren't understanding the spoken and written language well, so I decided to try a different route for them: foreach(day in Iteration) { while(hoursWorked < day.WorkHours) { if (resolveImmediatelyDefectsE... || day.IsDefectDay || !uncompletedStoriesExist) { while (defectsExist) { defect = FindTopUnclaimedDefectInDef...
I haven't posted in a while because I can't talk about what I'm doing for the most part due to NDC's. However, a new post about my least favorite tax engine, Symmetry. What a horrible pile of goo. Here's why I hate it: They charge for a 32 bit version and for a 64 bit version. What? The 32bit and 64 bit versions aren't AnyCPU compatible (the .net interface isn't), so you have to have different compiled versions if you want to support both. The API is a horrible mess! Talk about hard to use! We had...
I like the new ribbon features of Microsoft Office, although sometimes finding things can be a little difficult, since I've been using office and wordperfect for years and years. I recently bought PowerDirector because windows movie maker just wouldn't do what I needed to do. Upon opening the app, I see nice looking UI, complete with what appears to be a ribbon interface, at least until you click on the "Home" button, and notice that there aren't any ribbons. When you click on the "Home" button you...
Ran into a serialization problem with WCF the other day that was rather interesting to find and fix. It wasn't a problem with WCF, in the end, but rather with what we were telling WCF to do. So we have some complex entities that we're shoving through the serialization layer. We also send through lists of these entities, and the list may have references to itself. To keep our list sizes small, we've implemented a DataContractSerializerOpera... where when we create the data serializer, we...
Read this on foxnews today. I had to laugh. Having been a system admin, all I can think is duh? Have they never read BOFH? If you don't know what it is, read it here and here. Several notes: 1. We don't need to change our passwords as often. We don't write them down on sticky notes and post them on our desks. We don't give them out over the phone in restaurants (I overheard a bank teller's username and password once in a restaurant while she was on lunch break . . .), and we practice safe computing....
I received this in e-mail today: We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website...
We recently had a defect entered into our defect tracking system. Title: System Error Received when .net framework is not up to dateDescription: The following error is received when using click once and .net framework installation is below the current 3.5. It is thrown on most menu items, but not all. Could not load file or assembly 'System.Core, Version = 3.5.0.0, Culture =neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934... or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. No, REALLY??...
Read this from Fox News today. I find it odd that the only scientists that we're supposed to listen to are the ones that are FOR global warming, but all of the scientists that say it's crap (see a previous post, and this article by Richard S. Lindzen a professor of meteorology at MIT) are to be completely ignored. I hope that something happens to wake the clueless out of the Global Climate Change scam. Ah, but that's not what Global Warming is about. It's about politics, power, and money. Funny that...
In many ways, CAB and WPF have many similar functions. One area where there's overlap, and a little bit of pain is with WPF commands. If you're new to commands, here's a great blog post about them. The Microsoft Help for commands is here. Suppose the following: You have a search workspace that contains all of the logic for executing a search and displaying search results and a single search textbox. When a search result item is selected, you raise a cab event and then stuff happens. You want to go...
Yeah! The source is finally available. See the link below for details. .NET Framework Library Source Code now available - ScottGu's Blog Technorati Tags: .net,debug,news...
Today someone asked me, "How do you cause the double click event to fire in a tree view control using UI Automation"? Good question, and no, I don't have a good answer. Apparently, there isn't a good way to simulate this. In our case, we have a custom user control that is a popup that contains a WPF TreeView control. The user browses through the control until they find the node that they want and then they double click on the control to select the node, which is then raised as an event through the...
Technorati Tags: Global Warming,senate,scam,capitalism Last time I wrote about global warming being a hoax I received several very, um, shall we say "nice", responses telling me I was all alone in my belief and the people I used as a sources were stupid. In a report to the Senate of the US released on the 20th of December, they show that over 400 scientists from around the world are also skeptical about global warming. So much for the claim that all credible scientists think global warming is true....
Technorati Tags: video,help,learning,AJAX So I'm trying to learn the new AJAX stuff in .net 3.5. I've done quite a bit of web development, but the AJAX toolkit kinda skipped me. So I browse out to the getting started section of ASP.NET, hoping to find some documentation with examples on how to use this stuff, and all I find are stupid videos! I hate this trend, and it seems to be increasing. I read very quickly, and can skim documents to find what it is that I want. Skimming a video is next to impossible--you...
Technorati Tags: MAGE,documentation The mage -Install option is now different in .net 3.5. Instead of defaulting to true (as the documentation reads) it defaults to false, resulting in a online install only. To fix, just add -Install true at the end of your command line and it'll work correctly...
Technorati Tags: ClickOnce,MAGE,Microsoft,.net 3.5 A few days ago I wrote about issues I was having with Mage and click once. Basically, I was always getting the following when I'd try to install the click once application: PLATFORM VERSION INFO Windows : 5.2.3790.131072 (Win32NT) Common Language Runtime : 2.0.50727.1433 System.Deployment.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) mscorwks.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) dfdll.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) dfshim.dll : 2.0.50727.1433...
Shortly after sending my last post I got a message from community-credit.com saying that they were friends with geekswithblogs.net. What's up with that? Is this for real, or is it more spam? Should I be sending hate mail
Technorati Tags: ClickOnce,MAGE,.net 3.5,MageUI We've been struggling with ClickOnce using mage.exe and MageUI.exe to manually deploy the application. Since we're doing continuous integration, we need this to work. I've spent 4 hours with MS support trying different combinations of deployment to no avail. We've tried everything. Today, I built a sample application to see if it was our projects or MS. Using Visual Studio 2008, I created a new WPF application and left everything at it's default. The...
As you may have heard, Scott Guthrie announced today that they will be releasing the source for the .net framework and that you'll have debugging capabilities inside of VS 2008. You'll actually be able to step into the .net source and see what's going on. This is cool! I'm sure it'll also be a big boost for Mono: "Just how exactly are they writing that code?" How much of the runtime will then be "borrowed" for open source projects? Very good announcement...
First, I find it interesting that NCover is no longer going to be a free tool. I hope he makes it, it's a great tool. Second, using that free tool, I was having a problem getting things to go. I'm using CCNET for continuous integration and for one reason or another, it needed to run as the local system account with interactive abilities. As soon as we switched from a user account to this account, things started breaking. I spent several days working on the problem and finally found this blog post....
In my last post, I wrote about a couple of articles that would allow for patients suffering from a lack of a pancreas or thyroid to get dosed automatically. Today, on FoxNews, there's this article. Good to know that they're working on it
Recently I had the need to change the logging level for all loggers due to the need to hit the logging statements for NCover. This was harder than it appeared, and I couldn't really find anything out there that really documented the code you needed, so here's the code: private void TurnOnLogging() { log4net.Repository.ILoggerR... repositories= log4net.LogManager.GetAllRe... //Configure all loggers to be at the debug level. foreach (log4net.Repository.ILogger... repository...
Previously, we'd been using a combination of Gemini and excel to manage our product. It was doing ok--generating burns in Excel was a pain, making things match Gemini was a pain, but at least something was happening. Because of the pain, we did some research into several different "Agile" management products such as VersionOne, XPlanner, and ScrumWorks. By far, the product that I liked the best was the Rally software product, which really needs a name but doesn't have one. Rally is also the most...
This is in response to a comment about my last post. I expected something revolutionary and significantly better than what was currently on the market. Microsoft consistently does this with other applications. Sql Server is, in my opinion, FAR superior to Oracle and MySql. .net kick’s Java’s behind. Visual Studio is so far ahead of the competition that using anything else is painful. For those of you that live and die by Eclipse, VS 2005 is clearly a superior product. The XBOX 360 is also much better...
O.K.--so I got a shiny core duo 2 from dell the other day, and have vista loaded onto it. The performance thingy rates me as a 3.5 (because of the video card), and says I should be able to enjoy all of the snazzy new features of Vista.I start to tinker, and soon find that the Aero stuff is really only skin deep--as soon as you go into any of the dialog boxes for more advanced stuff (like the system dialog boxes, the "advanced properties" of the display, etc), you quickly find that this is just XP...
In a story on News.com, Novell and Microsoft are apparently going to work together for supporting Suse linux and Longhorn. Very interesting. In my opinion, this is huge. I can only hope that they also collaborate on Mono as well so that we can do .net development for linux and get .net 2.0 on linux. 1.1. is there, but 2.0 is still not quite ready. This should have Red Hat people up at nights...
Wow, ODP.NET 10.2.0.20 is not horribly stable yet. I'm having the following problems: 1. Data provider internal error(-3000) [System.String]2. Random connection dropping without reseting the Connection State Only way to deal with #2 is to dispose of the connection and try again, which seems to work most of the time. I'm connecting to a 10g running on Suse 10.1 in a virtual server, which slows disk IO, which seems to give Oracle grief. Item #1 is more fun. I've been able to track it to it saying that...
Call me a geek, but I like to play old dos games (like stelcon3, jazz jackrabbit, epic pinball, etc). I've tried a couple of solutions to get them to work. First is FreeDos running under either VMWare or Virtual PC. FreeDos is a great program, and I'm sure it works well for many people, but it does not work well for playing the old games. Running under either virtualization platform, it frequently gives weird errors with Emm386 (vmware 4.5 and ems just don't get along well together I guess--if you...
Call me an anti-java, oracle biggot, but these technologies are driving me crazy. First, Oracle's licensing plans are EXPENSIVE and COMPLEX. As updated January 11th, they now consider different hardware platforms cores to rate at different levels. For example, AMD/Intel cores are rated at .50 of a processor. Have a four core chip? You need two oracle processor licenses, and depending on the version of db you get, that means big bucks ($40,000 per processor for the enterprise version, YIKES!). DB2...
I'm a .net (c#) programmer, through and through, but work needed someone to port an API that I had recently written in C# to Java, so guess who got the job! So for the last 3 days, I've been fighting an issue with Java and Eclipse 3.2 and my own code. I've been getting the dreaded NoClassDefFound exception, and been unable, completely unable, to debug eclipse. Basically, when I attempted to instantiate a particular class, the NoClassDefFound exception was thrown, even though other classes in the...
Wow, who knew that the english language is so messed up! All I needed was the ability to input a word and get back it's plural, but that turned into most of a day project implementing something that works “MOST” of the time. sheesh! I'd post the code, but it belongs to my company, so I can't. However, here's how it was implemented: I found an algorithmic solution for pluralization that seems to work very well at http://www.csse.monash.edu.... I also found...
I like enums, but sometimes I wish I could provide a better mechanism for getting the descriptive name for the enum. I did a search for better mechanisms and really like the result I found at http://www.dotnet247.com/24... Basically, you use the [Description(”Descrip... attribute to put the description into the enum. Note that the Description attribute could also contain a resource string identifier, so that you could easily do localization. Nice and neat....
Searched out on the internet and didn't really find anything that was horribly succinct, so I wrote this class for fun. I had help from http://www.codeproject.com/... I hope you enjoy! Here's the code to call it: PostSubmitter post=new PostSubmitter();post.Url="h... jobs");post.PostItems.Add("...
.net makes some things really easy. Image manipulation is one of them. Here's a class that will resize and convert images to and from any of the .net formats. Be aware, however, that conversion to Icons will not work. For more information, see the article here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Sh... Enjoy! using System;using System.Collections.Generic;... System.Text;using System.Drawing;using System.Drawing.Imaging;using System.IO;using System.Drawing.Drawing2D; namespace WowSoft.Utilities{...
I was fighting with a drop down list on Friday, and I never did figure out what was going on. The list contains a set of all of the states in the US and the provinces in Canada and is bound to a DataSet. The user fills out a simple form (city and state) and the clicks on search. On the post back, server side, I looked for the value of the state, and it was always set to the first value in the dataset. First thing I found was that the list was being reloaded on the page reload. I took steps to stop...
Argh. For the first time, I've run headlong into a bug in vs.net that i can't work around. The bug description is described here: http://www.aspnetresources.... but basically, I get an error message telling me that I can't copy the dll from the temp directory to the run directory. If I close VS.NET and delete the bin and obj directories, then I can compile fine, but as soon as I run or debug the app, I'm hosed. When is MS going to release a VS.NET 2003 service...
In response to chaz: http://geekswithblogs.net/c... That's a nice sentiment, but sometimes, it just doesn't work that way. Take my boss for example. I'm CIO, but I've only finally been able to get our software legal after a 2 year struggle because, "Software is just too expensive!" Ironically, he goes after people with a lawyer if they share our data with others. It'd help if licensing was something that meer mortals could understand . . ...
So we have this affiliate that uses PHP for almost everything. Of course, the lip we get from them is that “Linux will rule the world, microsoft will die!” I've written a bunch of web services that basically allow them to talk directly to our system. They're using PEAR::SOAP and NuSoap, and of course, the problem MUST be on our side. I actually write up a telnet example that he can use. telnet to www.mysite.com port 80 and copy and paste in exactly the following: POST /mitwebservice/pageremoved/...
O.k.--first I have to admit, I'm rather new to this whole “Blog” thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a neophyte in terms of the internet, its just that I never took the time to make a blog. Silly me. I'm afraid this will be the dreaded, “getting to know you” initial post that I think all bloggers are required to write. So, who am I? I started programming back in the early 90's. At first it was just using qbasic and wordperfect scripts, but that advanced into access (ugh). I've...