I love using story boards (or task boards) for a number of reasons.  There's the big in-your-face visual aspect of them - people can't help but seeing them and it's always obvious to anyone what the state of an iteration is at.  Plus there's the communication aspect of them - teams use them as an information... Read more

I just ran into an issue with code coverage and generated code from the Visual Studio 2008 dataset designer.  Basically, all the code in the designer.cs is included in the coverage reports instead of being excluded as expected (see the image below), and yet all of the properties are marked with the DebuggerNonUserCode attribute (see my... Read more

Microsoft recently released a new tool in the vein of FxCop for analysing source code (instead of compiled assemblies) named, not so imaginatively, Microsoft Source Analysis for C#.  There's a blog entry with an overview from the team about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/05/23/announcing-the-release-of-microsoft-source-analysis.aspx  In summary the tool will check the consistency and layout of your code to... Read more

Looks like MSDN just got a face lift (according to Soma it's to make it more useful).  It's too early to tell on that front, but what I can say is that Microsoft should have figured out multilingual testing processes by now.  Seriously, this shouldn't happen: Who wants to bet that the testing team is based... Read more

I was recently asked by Aaron to do a blog post about KPI's when using Scrum (thanks for the suggestion!).  The basic idea being that many companies want to have role level KPI's, but how do you do that with Scrum, especially when Scrum seems to be about the performance of the team.  I say "seems"... Read more

Recently I did a post on breaking dependencies which used the Castle Windsor container as the Inversion of Control container.  I thought I'd also have a look at doing the same thing with the Unity container from Microsoft's Patterns & Practices team, which was version 1.0'ed last month. The good news?  It's pretty much just some... Read more

Let's assume you've done some reading recently and heard talk of this Loosely Coupled Architecture thing and how it's meant to help keep an application maintainable, make it more readily changeable and will assist in the creation of unit tests .   You know that it's the right way to go and you can see all the... Read more

A thread has sprung up on the scrumdevelopment list about seniority and scrum, and how some people don't like scrum because if it's all about the team then how do individuals get recognized and get treated as more senior than others. Well firstly, there's a misunderstanding that needs to be overcome here.  The agile manifesto states... Read more

Unfortunately Mitch has come down ill (get better, mate!) and won't be able to present at SBTUG - The Sydney Business & Technology User Group - tomorrow night.  Craig has kindly let me step in and cover for him and I'll be doing my Agile Agile presentation so feel free to come along and be a... Read more

Another quick holiday update - Wednesday we spent the day in the Cape Le Grande National Park near Esperance in Western Australia, which is apparently home to the whitest beach in Australia at Lucky Bay.  After visiting it I can understand why it's so highly rated; and the other beaches in the park aren't that far... Read more

Holidays are great when you're in a fantastic location.  The family and I are currently in Scarborough Beach, Western Australia have a great, relaxing time.   Check out this wonderful sunset.  You don't see sunsets like this on the east coast (for obvious reasons) Read more

Just a quick note to let you all know I'll be on leave for a few weeks in Western Australia driving around the southwest corner of this great country of mine.  I _might_ do an occasional blog post while I'm away but it's more likely that I'll be relaxing and sleeping instead - you can always... Read more

I had a client recently that was having a big problem with builds on dev machines failing due to files being locked and unable to be deleted. The problem irregular and it was causing the developers to get frustrated and waste a lot of time in stopping and restarting Visual Studio to try and release the... Read more

I had a situation recently where I needed to deploy a web site into a production environment from TFS where the only way we could transfer files was via FTP.  In case it's not obvious I didn't want to deploy every time the build ran, but rather, only when the build was declared good. To do... Read more

I saw a post this morning by David Anderson this morning on how a fault tolerant culture helps create great teams.  Admittedly he was talking about the British cycling team's recent gold medal haul but the point is valid regardless.  In his post he referred to W. Edwards Deming whom I'd never heard of as a... Read more

If you ever find yourself doing any Powershell work (maybe when using TFSDeployer for example) then you'll probably be editing .ps1 files in a text editor (I hope you're not still using notepad!!).  My personal tool of choice is Notepad++. Unfortunately most notepad replacements still aren't aware of the syntax rules for .ps1 files and treat... Read more

There were once 2 companies who both wanted to develop some custom software to help their businesses enter an evolving market and gain a competitive edge.  Both companies made an initial approximation of the costs involved in getting the software developed and both companies set aside a similar sum of money for the project.  Neither company... Read more

With IE8 Beta 1 finally getting out the door at Mix08 last week I figured I’d check on the competition and spark up FF3 Beta 4. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new (from a visible perspective) 1. Speed – it’s sooo much quicker to use.  You’ll notice the difference in ajax heavy apps (google reader,... Read more

I was watching Scott Hansleman’s ASP.NET MVC presentation this morning and noticed him zooming in on various screen areas and drawing around parts of the screen he was talking about during the demo.  “What the hell is he using to do that?” thought I. Initially I thought it must’ve been a tablet thingy and that if... Read more

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon getting to know the Castle Windsor IoC container again. I ran through the sample as a refresher and then converted a small app I had lying around to use loosely coupled services/components. Talk about simple, easy and powerful.  I've read enough about this thing to know how it works... Read more