05 August 2005
28 July 2005
Small earthquake in Wells, no pigeons injured
An interesting article in the Wells Journal. A suspect package was delivered to the job centre, leaking a foul smelling substance. The police were called and in this time of heightened national insecurity they turned out in force with the fire brigade and declared it a CBRN(Chemical, Biological, Radioactive or Nuclear) type of incident.
As the city centre was closed the traffic built up and a local greengrocer, tired of being asked by slowly passing motorists what the problem was, put a message on his chalkboard outside the shop:- "Bomb in Wells JobCentre".
Later in the afternoon the police paid the greengrocer a visit, and seized the blackboard under the Prevention of Terrorism Act saying that it was "evidence".
I'm not sure what it could be evidence of.
The newspaper also reports 70 portions of Fish and chips were bought from Tuckers fish and chip shop for the Fire Brigade and 18 portions for the Police.
No jobcentre staff were harmed.
As the city centre was closed the traffic built up and a local greengrocer, tired of being asked by slowly passing motorists what the problem was, put a message on his chalkboard outside the shop:- "Bomb in Wells JobCentre".
Later in the afternoon the police paid the greengrocer a visit, and seized the blackboard under the Prevention of Terrorism Act saying that it was "evidence".
I'm not sure what it could be evidence of.
The newspaper also reports 70 portions of Fish and chips were bought from Tuckers fish and chip shop for the Fire Brigade and 18 portions for the Police.
No jobcentre staff were harmed.
27 July 2005
Installing ASP.NET 1.1
This link tells you how to install .NET 1.1 on IIS. You need this to create Web apps.
17 July 2005
Google Maps
I have been playing around with the Google Maps API and have created my very own photo album / map. The API is nice, but Javascript is horrible.
I have managed to get it working so that I can just edit an XML file to add new pictures. It would be nice to have a way of selecting the year and having just the markers for that year showing.
There is a strange effect where the information displayed in the InfoWindows sometimes overflows, but when you redisplay the InfoWindow it resizes correctly to contain the information properly. Not sure what is causing that.
12 July 2005
09 July 2005
Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a free Visual Studio plugin that can compile MSIL to Java. So you can write in .NET and deploy your application to Linux.
Fragile Software Development
This is brilliant. The Fragile Manifesto. Read it and weep.
All we need now is a Fragile Alliance...
I really enjoyed this line:-
"A professional project manager, particularly one who is adept at creating and maintaining Gantt charts using Microsoft Project or another similar tool, is the most valuable person on any project."
When you get tired of this nonsense, this is where you can find the Agile Manifesto.
All we need now is a Fragile Alliance...
I really enjoyed this line:-
"A professional project manager, particularly one who is adept at creating and maintaining Gantt charts using Microsoft Project or another similar tool, is the most valuable person on any project."
When you get tired of this nonsense, this is where you can find the Agile Manifesto.
05 July 2005
Guidance Automation Toolkit
"Using the patterns & practices of the Guidance Automation Toolkit, you can make reusable code and pattern assets directly available in Visual Studio 2005."
As long as there is still something left for a programmer to do...
As long as there is still something left for a programmer to do...
02 July 2005
01 July 2005
Agile Summer School
Agile Summer School - 8-12th August, 2005. Training for Agile Developers.
Alas, I shall not be attending this one. I have spent my training budget for this year on an event at MS in Reading and Dr Neil's Extreme .NET. But it gives me hope for the future of the industry that there seem to be an increasing number of agile groups, events and courses.
This looks like a very good course, with days devoted to Mock objects and FIT.
Alas, I shall not be attending this one. I have spent my training budget for this year on an event at MS in Reading and Dr Neil's Extreme .NET. But it gives me hope for the future of the industry that there seem to be an increasing number of agile groups, events and courses.
This looks like a very good course, with days devoted to Mock objects and FIT.
30 June 2005
29 June 2005
Google maps
Google have added satellite images for the whole globe to google maps, very impressive, although the resolution is a bit patchy in areas. Also the UK seems a bit squashed.
22 June 2005
Lots of tools
Scott Hanselman has an impressive list of developer tools that he recommends. But surely you don't put all of these on one machine?
19 June 2005
Extreme .Net
On Friday I attended another Microsoft event presented by Dr Neil Roodyn, on the subject of Extreme .Net. Dr Neil is an entertaining presenter, very laid back. I was so impressed I even bought his book.
It was a packed day, and the slides should be available for download soon. Here are some of my rough notes:-
XP puts people first, then practices then technology, as it says on the Agile Manifesto people are more important than processes.
One book he recommended was "Software for your head" by Jim McCarthy. I remember hearing Jim McCarthy speak at VBits in 1996/7, he was fun too. His ideas seem to have been quite influential in the Agile movement. Certainly I remember him saying something about building early and often. Dr Neil suggests having a machine dedicated to doing automated builds continuously. And, rather like NUnit it should display red if it fails or green if it succeeds. He demonstrated a simple batch file that he uses for this. Simple things work. In a project the first things you should sort out are the build process and intallation. This is iteration zero.
I liked the idea of killing bugs as soon as you find them, rather than putting them in a database where they can reproduce.
He also talked about promoting XP within organisations, you need to sell it as being faster and cheaper. I would honestly never have thought of that, but apparently it helps.
A recommended tool was SSW Code Auditor which is a flexible rule checking engine.
He described using MSBuild from the command line and calling custom processes from the build process.
User stories should not take more than 2-3 days to implement. Break them down into tasks of less than 4 hours, and don't spend too long on planning, maybe a couple of hours a week.
Creating tests before code is building quality in up front. It makes you think as a user of the class rather than an implementor. Changes the way you write code.
There were some good demo's of refactoring support in VS Team System. Also Team System supports a TestProject type and a nice test coverage tool.
He also showed us code for testing GUI's, it seems to take more code, but using reflection you can automate GUI testing. Another demo was of testing ASP.NET and load testing a web server.
He talked about the MS Solutions Framework and it seems there may be an XP version of this on the way.
Mehra Nikoo has blogged on his experience of the event.
It was a packed day, and the slides should be available for download soon. Here are some of my rough notes:-
XP puts people first, then practices then technology, as it says on the Agile Manifesto people are more important than processes.
One book he recommended was "Software for your head" by Jim McCarthy. I remember hearing Jim McCarthy speak at VBits in 1996/7, he was fun too. His ideas seem to have been quite influential in the Agile movement. Certainly I remember him saying something about building early and often. Dr Neil suggests having a machine dedicated to doing automated builds continuously. And, rather like NUnit it should display red if it fails or green if it succeeds. He demonstrated a simple batch file that he uses for this. Simple things work. In a project the first things you should sort out are the build process and intallation. This is iteration zero.
I liked the idea of killing bugs as soon as you find them, rather than putting them in a database where they can reproduce.
He also talked about promoting XP within organisations, you need to sell it as being faster and cheaper. I would honestly never have thought of that, but apparently it helps.
A recommended tool was SSW Code Auditor which is a flexible rule checking engine.
He described using MSBuild from the command line and calling custom processes from the build process.
User stories should not take more than 2-3 days to implement. Break them down into tasks of less than 4 hours, and don't spend too long on planning, maybe a couple of hours a week.
Creating tests before code is building quality in up front. It makes you think as a user of the class rather than an implementor. Changes the way you write code.
There were some good demo's of refactoring support in VS Team System. Also Team System supports a TestProject type and a nice test coverage tool.
He also showed us code for testing GUI's, it seems to take more code, but using reflection you can automate GUI testing. Another demo was of testing ASP.NET and load testing a web server.
He talked about the MS Solutions Framework and it seems there may be an XP version of this on the way.
Mehra Nikoo has blogged on his experience of the event.
17 June 2005
12 June 2005
MS Acrylic
Microsoft Acrylic - a new graphics package. Obviously, acrylic pixels dry much faster than the traditional oil ones.
04 June 2005
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