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The influence of style upon methodology…

March 26th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , ,

Also see: Web Access for Visual Studio Team System

No matter how faithfully you try to follow your chosen project methodology (Scrum, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, CMMI, etc.) ultimately the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures you experience are determined by the habits, attitude, and style of the project manager and team members on the project. 

How is communication conducted? Meetings, hallway, bullpen, email, IM?

How do you react to change?  How well do you manage scope?

How much trust/distrust is there amongst team members?

How rigorously or adaptively do you apply your process to each project?

Do you micromanage or do you empower?

This is the crux of why so many people disagree with most definitions of exactly what Agile is.  This is why some people fail with one methodology while others succeed, and some unique individuals actually find great success with seemingly outdated methodologies like Waterfall.   Much like with any good pasta, its not the ingredients in the sauce, its the sauce-maker(s).

I guarantee you that even the most rigorous Agile shop will see great variance (good and bad) between projects merely due to the different personalities of the project managers who manage each project.  This is the human factor of software development that can never completely be erased.  Your best hope is to try to control, monitor, and compensate.

There are plenty of excellent books to help you define your rules-of-engagement, develop good habits, and provide checks-and-balances throughout your project.  However, ultimately experience is our best teacher for what habits, styles, and attitudes result in the most successful projects.  Of course, to complicate things further, these same success factors may change from project to project.

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Java Frameworks State of the (dis)Union.

March 26th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , ,

Paul Browne writes about the state of (dis)Union in the Java framework space, discussing the following projects: Spring MVC, JavaFX , Google Web Toolkit and Struts2.

Also see: Load(AssemblyName)

Also see: Finalization

Also see: On the Perils of Wikipedia


http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/256879990/thread.tss

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Reliability

March 25th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , , ,

Also see: Spring Web Flow features and feedback request

I’ve
been putting off writing this blog, not just because I’m on vacation in
Maui and have far more tempting things to do.  It’s because one of my blogs has already
been used on Slashdot as evidence that Windows cannot scale and won’t support
distributed transactions (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66598&cid=6122733 ), despite the fact that Windows scales well and does
support distributed transactions. 
So I’m nervous that this new blog will be quoted somewhere as evidence
that managed applications cannot be reliable.

 

The fact
is that there are a lot of robust managed applications out there.  During V1 of.NET, we all ran a
peer-to-peer application called Terrarium. 
This could run as a background application and would become a screen
saver during periods of inactivity. 
Towards the end of the release, I was running a week at a time without
incident.  The only reason for
recycling the process after a week was to switch to a newer CLR so it could be
tested.

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A Quick Fix for the Validator SetFocusOnError Bug

March 25th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , ,
The ASP.NET validators have this nice property called “SetFocusOnError” that is supposed to set the focus to the first control that failed validation. This all works great until your validator control is inside a naming container. I ran into this recently when using validators in a DetailsView. Take this simple example:

Also see: Finalization

<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<script runat="server">
 protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (!IsPostBack)
 DataBind();
 }
</script>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
 <title></title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="_frm" runat="server">
 <asp:DetailsView
 ID="dv1"
 DefaultMode="Edit"
 DataSource='<%# new object[1] %>'
 runat="server"
 >
 <Fields>
 <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="First Name:">
 <EditItemTemplate>
 <asp:TextBox ID="FirstNameTextBox" runat="server" />
 <asp:RequiredFieldValidator
 ID="FirstNameValidator1"
 ControlToValidate="FirstNameTextBox"
 ErrorMessage="First name is required."
 Display="Dynamic"
 EnableClientScript="false"
 SetFocusOnError="true"
 ValidationGroup="bug"
 Text="*"
 runat="server"
 />
 </EditItemTemplate>
 </asp:TemplateField>
 </Fields>
 <FooterTemplate>
 <asp:ValidationSummary
 ID="vs1"
 DisplayMode="List"
 ValidationGroup="bug"
 runat="server"
 />
 <asp:Button
 ID="Button1"
 Text="Post Back"
 ValidationGroup="bug"
 runat="server"
 />
 </FooterTemplate>
 </asp:DetailsView>
</form>
</body>
</html>

.csharpcode,.csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode.rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode.str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode.op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode.html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode.lnum { color: #606060; }

If you run this page and do a view source you’ll see that the FirstNameTextBox gets rendered like this:

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Finally, the Killer App

March 25th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , , ,

Also see: Load(AssemblyName)

Also see: Startup, Shutdown and related matters

Also see: Microformats are like RFID tags for the Web

If you’ve yet to be sold on the Internet, grab a seat and your favorite pointing device. My good man Ryan sent me a link to what is undoubtedly the Internet’s Killer App: The Beer Mapping Project

Chicago’s map is a bit limited — my neighborhood alone has over 450 bars — so get on it. It takes a village, comrades.

God Bless America!

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/01/18/435889.aspx

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Video games

March 25th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , , ,

Also see: YouTube Tries to Get Legal

Wired : At least i’m  not the only one that sees arena of video game fans as an interesting thing to write about.


As a side note – is it arrogant to link to your own blog?


http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/74

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This Guy Proves Anyone with a Keyboard can be Stupid

March 25th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , , ,

Also see: Silverlight 2 DataGrid walk-through posted

I don’t know if Leanord Shapiro is a blogger or whether his work appears in the Washington Post on a regular basis.
What I do know is that this post about Mixed Martial Arts and CBS is absolutely ridiculous and worthless.

Nor do I have any idea what “ Special to washingtonpost.com” means. Does it mean that this is exclusive to the newspaper’s website ? My guess is that in this case it actually describes Mr Shapiro’s reduced faculties and no one wants to use a pejorative adjective. Hence the use of the word “special”.

What I do know is that Mr Shapiro is hopelessly out of touch, and unquestionably uneducated about Mixed Martial Arts and the athletes that participate when he says “You put two guys (usually heavily tattooed) in a ring enclosed by a cage, surrounded by a howling mob, and just watch the blood flow as they pummel themselves into submission, or occasionally break a bone or three. That’s entertainment?”

The he shows his sexist side with ” Oh yes, women will also fight it out on CBS, yet another revolting development.”

Then to show how little mis-informed he is ” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is getting involved, promoting MMA matches and also airing them on his HDNet channel on DirecTV. For that alone David Stern ought to fine and suspend him. He probably yells at those refs, too “.

Hey Leanord, HDNet is on every smart cable and satellite provider reaching more than 66mm homes. But if you get us on DirecTV, thats great. Maybe yo Read the rest of this entry »

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Note to self: Blog about using Service Broker

March 24th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , , ,

Also see: A first stab at BaseN encoding with a focus on general alphabet encoding.

Also see: A Couple of My Rules for Startups

Also see: Interested in Artificial Intelligence? What about Wiki’s? Well, now you can have both.

Just a note to myself to do a braindump on all this Service Broker shiznit I have been playing with lately.

Potential discussion topics:

  • MessageTypes, Contracts, Queues, and Services.
  • Internal Activation, Routing, & External Activation
  • Using the Sql Server ServiceBroker sample library.
  • Implementation using SqlClr vs. TSQL
  • Developing via messages instead of procedures…
  • Compare & contrast Service Broker vs. Workflow Foundation vs. BizTalk
  • The nifty Sql Service Broker Admin tool (3rd-party)
  • Practical examples:
    • Async “fire-and-forget” stored procedure invocation
    • Query Notification for cache invalidation
    • PubSub


http://weblogs.asp.net/lhunt/archive/2007/06/14/note-to-self-blog-about-using-service-broker.aspx

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Chicago geek dinner 11/22

March 24th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , ,

Also see: LINQ – The Uber FindControl

Also see: REST2SQL in a Jiffy, with Tagspace for Spice

Also see: Channel 9 Interview

When: Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
Where: Rock Bottom @ State & Grand
When: 6PM

Last day to get out before the entire Midwest descends on our fair city for the holiday shopping season.

Bear down!
http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2006/11/20/chicago-geek-dinner-11-22.aspx

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Java Concurrency, another series on its issues

March 24th, 2008 by kerrysoft and tagged , , ,

Previously in the blog section at TSS we presented a series on the issues related to Java concurrency, continuing with what is definitely a topic of interest given the emerging processor architectures in the industry, we present this post covering yet another series on the issues of Java concurrency.

Also see: YouTube Tries to Get Legal

Also see: Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development

Also see: Claimspace, a Long Tail Recognition System


http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248003447/thread.tss

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