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I have spent a lot of time through the night and some today to try to get my personal blog in order after the Mac options didn't pan out. We have a really important, large external release going out to two external banks next Friday but we stopped this week's Iteration to fix bugs that had been found. In XP, you don't keep going when you have bugs, you stop and fix them. VSTS/TFS TFS is still way too hard to install. The install that my experienced IT guy started last week finally got done last night and took him roughly 16 hours of work time to install including SQL Server 2005 Standard. That is still way too long. To "breadboard" TFS, I am putting in my Workflow Architectural Spikes. More later. Technorati Tags: .NET , VSTS , TFS , Team FoiFinancial and Banking , Extreme Programming , Agile , Agile Development , Workflow , K2 , Windows Workflow , Mocks Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I referred to my frustration in my post yesterday about "not really getting to post what you really want to." That is, to some extent, the catch of blogging in general, that there is a lot you can't say in "professional" blogs. I am an expressive person by nature. The second aspect is being on codebetter.com . I feel that CodeBetter is one of the best and most consistent sites in the development community and that we have made a huge difference in bring a whole aspect of Continuous Design and other state of the art development practices. I like to think we are helping to change the .NET community one post at a time from the drag & drop RAD mess to the disciplined TDD/Design Patterns/DI/Agile/Architecture world that we would like the .NET community to become; that there is another way besides just running Visual Studio; that investing in your craft and job makes a world of difference. With all that comes a great pressure on what I can blog. Now don't get me wrong: NO ONE at CB has ever said what I can or can not post. I have been given 100% freedom. I just feel an internal pressure to maintain extraordinarily high standards. Moreover, every once in a while, if I slip in something not mind blowing latest Agile post but personal or whatever, I might get some reader (rarely) saying "what is this ***?" My feelings really get hurt as I have blogged consistently relevant .NET content over 5 years in this community , something that only Simon Fell can also claim (Peter Drayton doesn't blog anymore). But it also produces a bit of anger in me as I stated from day one here, that I was going to blog what I want, whenever I want and that no one is paying me for doing this . I spend hours on each N&N post for instance. Thus there is no right for people to have expectations that they are entitled to something. If someone doesn't like a blog, get your own. It's also as easy to unsubscribe. That being said, I have thousands of loyal readers and there is huge degree of satisfaction Read More...
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Sitting here on Saturday morning with a nice cup of Kona coffee. There just is no better coffee in the world. Strong but deceivingly smooth. I really miss our former annual trips to the Big Island that we used to take with my Father-In-Law and family before he got ill. We used to go up in the hills and buy direct from the growers. Umm, nothing better. The coffee may actually help me get over my funk morning as there is now a lot going on my personal life but you know you never get to blog what really matters Agile/Extreme Programming/Tools While Steve was off having a baby , I went back into the team pairing full time for this Iteration rather than doing do the advance work on Workflow and stuff. It felt really good and of course it was a challenge for me, as many of the particulars of the system have changed since I last paired and I had to actually relies on my pair more. What floored me, even though it shouldn't at this point, is just how good this team has gotten. Every single person on the team could explain any place in the code at any time and we were able to evolve the design and code together. It still blows me away the power of pair programming BTW, we are working on our THIRD release of our Collateral Management tools and architecture to at least two Top 50 Banks! Ayende has released Rhino Mocks 3.0 , the premier Mocking solution on .NET IMHO He was also on .NET Rocks talking about NHibernate and Rhino Mocks Since he still had time after the last two somehow, he also put out an hour long screen cast about Rhino Mocks Jeremy is Code Complete on Structure Map 2.0 Financial and Banking Mike Walker announces the OBA Reference Application Pack for Loan Origination Systems (OR-Loss ). This is a lot of great stuff here Mike is also doing a Financial Services Unwrapped IV Webcast Workflow Paul Andrews blogs about the 3rd performance paper released for WF Sylvain blogs that K2 BlackPearl Beta 1 TR2 is available. BlackPearl is the version of K2.NET built on WF CLR/C# Read More...
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I have been working with the Office Live Services Beta for some months now. They just went live with my site over the weekend (although I still have to work on the domain name transfer) and it looks pretty good! I have a new Header and Home Page design. I have added my How-To STS/Window Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF to the refurbished WCF page . I added a new Domain Driven Design page under Software Engineering . My Presentations, as always are here . Hey, what else am I going to do while I am waiting for my flight? I would like and appreciate any and all feedback as comments here. What's good? What's bad? Knowing my blog and its subjects, what would you like to see? Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , INETA , MVP , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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A great treat today was the Architect MVPs having a tour of the PAG Agile facilities with my very good friend Peter Provost. What they have accomplished, especially within the Microsoft office system, is pretty amazing. I will publish pictures later as this information is alll public. They have constructed a number of rooms (maybe 6) that are re-sizeable to serve differing team sizes on the fly. In each room, they have created an Agile "War Room." They have pairing stations like I talked about here that we did. The walls of the room are a special kind of glass that are actually full Wall Talkers for collobrative design. Each of the pairing stations has two flat screens on pivoting equipment so that you can adjust the screens to work the way the pair does. All the cabling has been put under a raised hidden floor. Each room has a projection wall that the computers can connect to via Vista's features. All the people sit together in one of these rooms but the interesting thing is that they wanted to have glass so that the developers could still have a view of the outside and not be a "cave." There is a lot more I am sure I am missing but I encourage you to dig up Peter's posts on this. My group, when we moved to Philly, also spent a chunk of money making a first class Agile facility. We have a large open space with wall talkers. We have a a bunch of pairing stations with dual monitors. The pairing stations are flat in the sense that any pair of people can go up to any station with the chairs and go. Like Peter's groups, we created an area behind for quieter time, to do email. People use their laptops in this area to do email, etc. We don't even have email and such on the pairing stations. We created a base Win2K3 system image with all our tools, seetings (NUnit, etc) and have the exact same image on all stations. More on this later. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Yesterday was registration today. I got to spend some time with Patrick Smachia and Scott Hanselman looked at the absolutely amazing new beta of NDepend . Patrick has built a new powerful query language and some great visualizations into the tool that absolutely convinced me I need to use this for myself and my team. The Code Better team,of which there are like 9 of us here has been doing a lot of hanging out as well. Last night, we had a regional dinner for the Americas. All I can say is that both Beth Massi and Nick Landry were out of control during Kerioke! -). After that, I joined Rod Paddock, Jim Duffy, Claudio, Scott Swigart and about 20 others in seeing 300 , which rocked! Today, we had a Bill Gates keynote. I am under NDA for the whole week so I can't say anything really other than experiences. I thought the Bill keynote was not one of his best. We had good sessions today culminating with a great one from Don Box and Chris Anderson, where they sort of revealed what they are working on but again can't say anything. We also had God Anders Heilsberg present an awesome presention on LINQ. Great discussions all day with CB's Jeremy Miller on Agile Architecture and many other agile design issues. If I were to get anyone on the planet to work with us, Jeremy would certainly be at the top or near the top of that list............. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip , partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-). Agile/Development Tools On my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall. Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier. NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey. Speaking of NUnit, they also have a new release, NUnit 2.4 Release Candidate (2.4.0). The Release Notes are here and include some nice features: A new syntax and internal architecture for Asserts is being introduced in this release, based on the notion of constraints found in JMock and NMock. The Assert.That method is used to make an assertion based on a constraint Assert.That( actual, constraint, message, args ); Assert.That( actual, constraint, message ); Assert.That( actual, constraint ); The constraint argument may be specified directly using one of the built-in constraint classes or a user-defined class. It may also be specified using one of the syntax helpers provided as static methods of the Is class, such as Is.Null Is.Empty Is.EqualTo( object ) Is.CollectionContaining( object ) Is.SubsetOf( collection ) SCSF is one of the most visible Microsoft projects being done in an Agile way. They are crazy as us doing one week Iterations. Blaine has some reflections on Iteration 3 . CB brother, Jeremy asks what OSS tools are you using in development? As I answered there, they include: NUnit CruiseControl.Net FitNesseDotNet RhinoMocks Subversion TortoiseSVN Ankh Wiki Speaking of tools. my good buddy Tomas (see you next week!) has a nice list of Text Editors One of the things Raymond and I discussed in Oklahoma was Read More...
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I must apologize to my very good friend Jim Shore who I was supposed to put a blog post up for quite a while ago and I spaced it in the frenzy of two projects I am in now. As you might remember, Jim came on my team and really built the team up into the super team they are now. He is a master of Extreme Programming, that's right I said XP, not "Agile," and I am thrilled that he is developing a must-read book on Extreme Programming . They are looking for reviewers so pitch in especially if you do NOT have a lot of experience with XP: " I'm very proud to announce that chromatic and I are writing a book called The Art of Agile Development . It will be published by O'Reilly in 2007. Our aim is to make an intensely practical book that shows mainstream development teams how to adopt, use, and ultimately master the art of agile software development. See the preface for more. We are currently writing the draft manuscript and we'd like you to be part of the review process. If you'd like to help out, great! Read the sections linked below and send your comments to the art-of-agile mailing list . We provide a list of questions with each section for you to focus on as you review. We eagerly read every review, although we usually don't respond unless we have questions ." Technorati Tags: Extreme Programming , Agile , Agile Development , Books Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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So, I have been writing a bunch of posts over the last 14 months, how we have been using Agile, actually full Extreme Programming practices to build a multi-million dollar Enterprise Software platform and application for the banking sector. We certainly have seriously stressed Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to their limits as this is not a small piece of software, but a large Enterprise solution that gets sold into the top banks in the world. We certainly have proven that you can use Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to build a 1.8 million dollar Enterprise product family. have talked about being an Agile Architect and why it's neccessary, how we went to CTP in July , the Process we use, our tools , and even our failings . So, after 48 Iterations we finished all the functionality we had agreed with Business was necessary for a "Phase I" delivery of our Next Generation/V5.0 product, as our Next Generation architecture will span an ambitious set of goals and products on top of this platform. Business and Development agreed together that we would stop and start a three week Iteration of fixing bugs in our backlog, testing and eating our dog food. In Extreme Programming, you are really not supposed to carry over bugs out of the Iteration but this was extremely hard with one week Iterations. We turned out very well overall as all the testing found just over 100 total bugs for 14 months work which is an order of magnitude less bugs than our previous product development techniques. In addition, we have over 1,000 unit tests and the code is well factored, clean and maintanable. The best part is the whole team understands it, not individuals. I actually haven't written about it but I have been working as Agile Architect the last few months on the next phase and not as part of the Iterations directly. These involve a whole lot of Workflow, Reporting and much more. Anyhow, I made a stand with my management the last 3 weeks and insisted that I code and Read More...
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Family morning at the Gentiles means the whole family watching Radiohead from 1994 while waiting for the Starbucks to come... Software Development Ayende points to this great list Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money and asks what excites you as a developer? As I said in a Retrospective last night, its not about money for me or just a job (expressed as "Build Something That Matters"). If I can't have the passion for my project, my career as a Software Architect, taking the responsibility for my own career, than I need to find something else to do because this is far from the least stressful job out there. You had better be in it because you love it and love to create and ship stuff that delights customers. Otherwise I can go weave baskets out in New Mexico... Data/OR/M/Software Architecture Jeff Palermo notes that we'll see Microsoft's OR/M soon and I can't help thinking BFD and its about time. After years of misleading developers that Stored Procs and database-driven architectures and apps were the only way , is too late? Many of us who have been doing this for a while and come out of other environments are already way ahead using Wilson OR/M, NHibernate, LBLgen and others. And everyone gushes "oh, ah, LINQ is so cool!...... I really like my friend Peter's piece Specifications are Like Object-Oriented Messages . A must-read! Avaon/WPF XamlPadX Updated! Vista Tim Sneath has Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes Technorati Tags: Software Development , Data , OR/M , LINQ , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I am still reeling from seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Mars Volta 2 nights ago in Philly at the Wachovia Center. The Peppers were beyond grea t with Frusciante taking a very active lead role. Many of the songs contained a full-out Hendrix-type feedback solo in it that showed the depth of his talents. I think Stadium Arcadium is their best album since Blood, Sex, Magic (which they pulled out the title song the other night!!). You can't beat a start of Can't Stop-> Dani California! Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands (although hard to take at times) and I am listening to the brilliant new Ampheture right now which they played in full the other night. Live, they come off as a wall of sonic noise and Bixler-Zavala wailing singing, an assault on the senses that drove people nuts (my wife wanted to leave!) and their greatness only came through in sporadic moments (Viscera Eyes). Okay, a lot of stuff today. Number one, I want to congratulate my good friend and master of these types of posts, Mike Gunderloy for hitting The Daily Grind 1000 !! Mike is an incredible asset to the community and a terrific writer to boot. If you are one of the rare people not already subscribed, get your ass over there this minute and make it so! I have started to write (for work) a Workflow XOML loader and executor. I want to do something like XamlPad or even Snippet Compiler to execute my workflows. I have the hosting of the runtime down and loading the XAML/XOML. More later. WCF/SOA/Indigo/BizTalk/Workflow/Distributed .NET Another good friend of mine, Tomas Restepo. has some great stuff: He released his MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation. He addresses MsmqListenerService concerns with the above Gets answers for the question of how to get the SOAP Action associated with a given operation when all you have is the OperationDescription for it Points to Ralph Squillace s post an walkthrough entry of how metadata publication (MEX + WSDL) is enabled in Windows Communication Read More...
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Anonymous asked a real good question on my last post that I think I need to share my answer with all of you. Well Sam, have you ever thought why you're always on the 'bleeding edge'? You see to me, if you're a trainer, you need to "sell" to your customers. But if you try and earn a living and get your customers working with good and stable software, you shouldn't be pushing the latest. Then of course there's the MS evangelist, who just pushes everything MS whether good or not, whether original or copy. Just add some buzzwords, throw an MS in front and there's "cutting edge" technology for you. I hope one day this all slows down for the benefit of all. Here is my response: SamGentile said: Thanks for the comments. Personally, I'm on the bleeding edge because thats what excites me and pushes me from stagnation. It's made me a better INETA speaker and Architect over all. For instance, I got on the NGWS/.NET bandwagon in 1999. I bet my career on it and when .NET shipped in 2002, I was a great 2 years ahead of anyone which landed me great consulting gigs at Microsoft, Groove and others. Its the way I drive myself but its also what keeps me excited and not bored. A great Architect designs for the next 12-18 months, implements for the next 6 and the last 3rd of their job is to see the "Big Horsey" picture 1-3 years out. I try to combine all three because my employers demand a three-headed architect like that and write it into my job description. In terms of "selling", I * never * sell anyone anything whether Microsoft or otherwise. I take my moral and technical responsibility *extremely seriously* and only make recomendations based on business needs and requirements and knowledge of a particular technology . Technology for technology sake is just a geek excersise. Its only when technology satisifes business needs that its worth anything . Thats why I practice Agile: to keep it grounded in real business Read More...
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I mentioned back months ago how well things were going back in Iteration 20 . Since that time, we have been consitently hitting our weekly Iterations with the previously noted one here . We did learn a lot from that Iteration and move on not repeating the mistakes. Specifically, the problems revolved around in-adequate task breakdown and bad estimates. It is very important not to get a sense that the Planning Meeting *must* get done by some time and perhaps jepordize proper task breakdown. We hurries through our planning and thus screwed our iteration. During our Monday morning Iteration meeting, we have a demo of working software that we did the week before. It is vitally important in Extreme Programming to have working, integrated and tested software at all times and be essentially "shippable" at any Iteration boundary or at least Release boundary. You will see how that played into shipping our CTP. We also have a Retrospective where we get real honest about what went well and what didn't and what we can improve from the previous Iteration. Then we enter the Planning Game. Business presents stories. We come up with enough that we think will match our present Velocity and then the whole team does Design. We break down all the stories into Tasks. During that, it's vitally important to allow enough time to discuss what database tables need to be added/modified, what objects in the Domain Model get effected, overall approaches; i.e. design. At the same time, we cannot let it descend into the lowest details and out of control. So it's a balancing act. As mentioned before, Jim and I introduced one-week Iterations way back here as an way to raise the Sense of Urgency and get everyone's head in the game and get everyone to own the product. Frankly, the team was underperforming at the time but since that time, we have become an awesome machine with Friday after Friday delivering on our objectives. The team has gotten so *great* that they now love the One Week Iterations and Read More...
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I noticed that my Feedburner feed picked up a couple of hundred subscribers all of a sudden and wasn't sure why. I know I was good in Syracuse but there weren't that many people-)). I was floored and honored to learn that Scott Hanselman , in his 2 5th Hanselminutes , had listed me in his 20 or so Favorite Blogs and had highly recomended my blog for my New and Notable posts as well as saying nice things. Scott is, of course, a giant in our community and I highly recomend you read his blog as well as subscribe to his show. For new readers, I started this blog in March 2002, when there were only Peter Drayton , Simon Fell , and myself as Microsoft blogs. I was an " Interop Beast " as Scott and Carl talk about but lately, I post a lot about my daily experiences in being an Architect & Lead on an Agile team that has been actually using Indigo/WCF for almost a year now. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I am very pleased that two of my good friends, James Avery and Jim Hol mes are working on a most excellent book, Windows Developer Power Tools. I was helping Jim with some WCF stuff and now I am a full fledged Tech Reviewer with all the benefits such as lack of sleep that come with it-). Anyhow, I can't say anything other than boy is this book going to rock !! But don't take my word on it, see nine chapters on Safari Rough Cuts ! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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