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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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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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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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We finally saw some snow here but it was under an inch. Today, my team has a release party. After 14 months and over 80 iterations, we have shipped on top of our architecture an enterprise collateral management solution and deployed in a large bank in Paris and London and they have accepted it. We have a lot still to do in essentially building the full portfolio of products on the new architecture that we had on the very old COM based one of the past but today is a celebration! Windows Workflow Mark has updated the source for WFPad to work with the latest WF. This is a must have if you are doing WF development Introduction to Hosting Windows Workflow Foundation [via Harry ] Provides an overview of how an application hosting Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) can manage and monitor running workflows and gives an overview of the runtime services and their out-of-box implementations. Managing Windows Workflow Events on a Web Server and More Managing Avalon/WPF An updated version of the Expression Design December CTP is now available that no longer expires at the beginning of 2007. You can download the updated CTP here: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-design/free-trial.mspx Walt tells us the good news that the latest version of Reflector can disassemble BAML to XAML Mike Swanson returns with WPF Wizards, a Free DataGrid (!?), Improved Illustrator Export, and WPF/E Training WinForms Andrew points to some great articles on MVP in the context of WinForms: Dan Bunea Jeremy Miller Michael Feathers SOA/Architecture Harry points to his teammate Dale who is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles , and then drills into the first three: meets business needs , requires governance and responds to changing business drivers . Just Released! Enterprise Library 3.0 January 2007 CTP [via Mike ] ASP.NET/Web Scott Guthrie has announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (formally known by the codename Atlas) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark Read More...
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A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with my sleep hours all screwed up. I am enjoying my week here nonetheless. I don't know quite what to make of Brussels. Some parts remind me quite a bit of Paris but there is this weird mix of "modern" glass buildings although the style is a bit "older" than such US buildings. I don't know, I'm jet lagged and probably making no sense. The (potential) customer we are visiting is actually quite large > 3,000 employees most in one large building and I have been working hard on a "High Level Technical Document." Its' certainly some BDUF but this is a large SaS type architecture across 3 data centers that has many Enterprise issues (levels of Failover, SLAs, SQL Server Hot Mirroring, Perimeter Zone Security, etc. to deal with and get right. Anyhow, the food is good and there is a lot of espresso-). Architecture The Open Group (the TOGAF guys) has scheduled what appears to be an interesting conference on Enterprise Architecture and SOA in San Diego [via Architecture Blog ] Avalon/WCF Karsten gives an update on the North Face In Store Explorer WCF application that floored many of us at PDC05 and has now been deployed . He also reminds, "Note that the white paper written about this application is still relevant and worth reading. The code samples all work just fine on the final bits and have some useful code as far as state management, image montages and a 3D carousel." My good friend and fellow Smart Client track speaker, Walt Ritscher has started a new WCF blog at http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com - Subscribed! Check out XAML to IL Explained Part 1 , WPF/e Example - Game of Life WCF/Indigo/SOA Nicholas Allan has his best of 2006 (and what a year it was for him/them!). Also check out Zen Faults Other Ted Neward has his predictions for 2007 , of which I mostly agree with all of them but one of the best qualities of Ted 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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