When using Scrum for the development process a team begins an iteration by sitting with the Product Owner and working through which items from the product backlog they can complete by the end of the iteration.  The team then makes a commitment to deliver on those items and gets to work. What sometimes happens is that... Read more

I'm pleased to say that I've just completed my Certified Scrum Master course.  After 3 years of doing agile/scrum work I've finally decided to get some certifications.  The course was presented by Jens Ostergaard and he did a great job teaching people about the principles and practices of Scrum.  Also, rather graciously, he invited me to... Read more

As most people know Visual Studio incorporates the FxCop static code analysis tool so you can perform static code analysis and check that your application follows good coding standards and doesn't contain nasty little surprises like forgetting to dispose of IDisposable objects, etc. Recently I was doing some work with WCF and wanted to check that... Read more

I did 2 presentations on agile today as part of the Readify Developer Network events that Readify holds for the developer community (they're free so please come along).  As I recently did an hour long presentation on "Agile From a Developers Perspective" I wanted to avoid repetition so I thought I'd try to do something a... Read more

Thanks, I think, to Jim Benson (aka OurFounder) and Darren Neimke both talking about social networking recently and as a practical follow up to my own semi-related post about it, I'm now finally twittering.   I've sworn in the past that I wouldn't do this because of the attention breaking issues, however I've found that it's actually... Read more

I’ve recently stumbled across a tool that detects duplicate code (aka code clones) called CCFinder.  It’s definitely not the simplest thing in the world to download and install, and it’s a little bit painful to exclude generated files (it has to be done manually) but it does do make finding repeated code a lot easier than... Read more

Darren recently posted about getting help through networking.  I hadn't actually seen his post when I drafted the following, but it's really quite useful.  If you don't have a good network of people you can ask questions of then go and have a read (in fact, go have a read of it anyway). ---- <Ad Voice>... Read more

I just watched Seth Godin's presentation to Google from a few years back and found that it's just as relevant today as it was then. It's about 40 mins long and it well worth watching, even if you're not a marketer, if not just to see some great presentation skills.  The talk itself It contains some... Read more

I've recently presented an RDN session around the country focused on agile development, and what it means for developers. In each session I've been asking people for questions.  Here are a few of the most common questions, and some (short) answers for them. 1. How do you convince management that you should use an agile methodology?... Read more

On the project I am currently working on we had a recent issue where opening a solution in VS2005 was causing a few messages to be displayed.  I was seeing the following "Projects have recently been added to this solution....", and "Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read" I eventually found... Read more

As part of my recent Readify Developer Network presentation on Agile Development for .NET Developers I did a quick demo on test driven development and unit testing.  I've made a 10-minute video for the TDD section of the presentation and put it on YouTube so you can look at it any time you like.  Enjoy :-)... Read more

Ask most developers what they do for their job and they'll tell you that that they write software.  Well, technically that may be the major function performed in the execution of their job, but a developer's goal should not be to write software, but to write software that meets someone's a needs or wants.  To give... Read more

Check out this proof of concept for head tracking and virtual reality using the Wii remote.  Simply awesome!  Thanks to AustralianGamer for the link. Read more

In Readify we have a weekly beer-o-clock email on Fridays based around 3 questions, the first 2 being work related and the 3rd usually something off the wall, where we can talk about the week that's been and share it with the rest of the company.  As the year approached it's conclusion we did a similar... Read more

I try to avoid doing copy posts (ie where I just parrot someone else's thoughts) but this struck a chord with me today.  Jeff Attwood of Coding Horror fame talks about the value we place on code beauty and how no one else cares.  To quote: I have a friend who works for an extremely popular... Read more

I'll be presenting a free session on agile development and what it looks like from a .NET developers point of view as part of the free Readify Developer Network events we regularly hold around the country (Sydney, Canberra & Melbourne).  If you're not still on holidays between Jan 15 - 17 (check the RDN calendar) then... Read more

So, you decide to take this shiny new agile development methodology that everyone is talking about and use it on a new project you've just gotten sign off for.  You get commitments from your customer (I refer to either internal or external customers here) to have a high degree of involvement and you go and assemble... Read more

If you are writing unit tests using MSTest then be aware of the Assert.Equals method as shown here:Assert.Equals(string1, string2);Instead of using the .Equals() method you should actually be usingAssert.AreEqual(string1, string2);- OR -StringAssert.Equals(string1, string2);The problem is that Assert.Equals is just the inherited Object.Equals method. It does nothing but compare object equality (not value equality) and return a... Read more

For those who attended the RDN Presentations today, thanks for coming! It was great to see you and fun to be able to talk with you about Workflow Foundation. The slides from the presentation will be available shortly on the RDN calendar page of the Readify web site.Update (22-Dec): The slides are now available from the... Read more

Daniel Crowley-Wilson has just released a nifty little utility to copy the contents of a file to the clipboard without opening the file in notepad. Given it was done in an hour it's a very good piece of work.  Check it out at http://www.ldarg.net/blog/2007/12/6/send-to-clipboard.html Read more