Darren has written an interesting post on methodologies and how he's come to view them as a source for procrastination rather than a source of process enlightenment.Here's the key part of the message:The thing that none of those books ever tell you is this... you either have it, or you don't! You will rarely learn this... Read more

So I've been tagged by Ducas.  I thought I'd avoid all this but you know what they say - "You can run, but you can't hide!" The funny thing is I don't actually consider myself as a classic developer any more.  My recent history has been as a CTO and more often than not that has meant talking... Read more

The OzSilverlight mailing list is now up and running, ready for discussions of all things Silverlight.  Subscribe using mailto:[email protected]?subject=subscribe. It's just been born and is still taking shape so if you want mail archives, a home page or anything else, post a message and be heard :-) And in case you aren't aware of them, there are... Read more

I first picked this one up on via Andrew on the Australian Scrum Community. Reg Braithwaite has written an essay on the difference between Deterministic development and Probabilistic development.It's a great read, and if I ever needed another reminder why "inspect & adapt" is a great mantra to follow and of the difficulties in implementing organisational... Read more

There's a common trait in developers that if they didn't write something then it must be rubbish.  Usually this is just a symptom of not taking the time to understand what the software or library does well and working within those boundaries.  OK, I'll admit it, third party software doesn't always meet your needs and sometimes... Read more

<plug> Fellow Readifarian Paul Glavich has been co-authoring Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX for the last 12 months and has just announced it's availability for general public consumption.  Chock full of wholesome AJAX goodness, this is a book you should go and check out. </plug> Nice work Glav, and congratulations! Read more

This just came in handy - FireFTP is a way to upload to an FTP site from within Firefox.Better than downloading CuteFTP or the full blown Mozilla suite. Nice ;-) Read more

Well, this is kinda cool :-). Google has released the Code Prettifier - a little bit of javascript and css to turn unformatted code into something nice:For examplevoid Main(){ Console.WriteLine("Hello Blog!!");}Can becomevoid Main(){ Console.WriteLine("Hello Blog!!");}With just the following tags around the code <pre class="prettyprint">...</pre> or <code class="prettyprint">...</code>Thanks Google!P.S. Looks like I need to work on the... Read more

The MSDN Library has been offering Wiki like functionality for quite a while now (though I'm yet to see it really used). What's interesting is that this week the library will be open for tagging.This opens up all sorts of potential in terms of categorising information in a way that is much more useful for people,... Read more

The links below are for a few presentations that you may find useful in explaining to others how agile works. Feel free to take them and use them as you wish.Agile Overview (PP2007 or PP2003) - a basic overview of the tenets of agile and some tips on making it work (based on scrum)Scrum Overview (PP2007... Read more

I've been playing around with an early access version of Mingle on and off for the past week (even if early access only means one month before the general public). I've got to say it's a really nice program. Yes there are a few minor quirks but it's a great tool for managing scrum under the right... Read more

In an agile project requirements are often discovered, adapted and/or changed completely as the project progresses and very little up front design work is performed as a result, unlike traditional methods that work on the belief that requirements can be defined up front and then fixed for the duration of the project. For project managers who need to... Read more

In a previous post I talked about the 4 tools you need for managing an Agile project, and how lo-tech those solutions are. While I stand behind that approach, there is often a need to electronically manage that process and for me that tool would normally be Excel (or Google).Well, Thoughtworks have just released a product... Read more

As a followup on my previous post about making your browser faster, the vast majority of visitors to your web site will be using browsers loaded with the default settings. How can they get a better experience when visiting your site?Thankfully Steve Souders & Tenni Thourer gave a presentation on this subject a while back and... Read more

One of the speed limitations with browsers is the number of simultaneous connections they make to the web server. On modem connections this limitation makes sense, but on broadband connections why do you need the limit so low.The good news is there are ways to increase this limit and let your browser request more items at... Read more

The Sandcastle project team is obviously making good progress. They recently released their latest CTP and now they've been given an official home on the Microsoft MSDN site.Keep up the good work Anand & crew. Read more

Now this is a tempting distraction... The Wii is being opened up to the mass market of independent developers who want to write mini-games, tinker or just have fun.It's called WiiWare and there's a press statement from Nintendo about it.I'll be really curious to see how this pans out. Oh, and apparently worldwide sales of the... Read more

I was recently asked what tools you need for Scrum. It's a common enough question and in the software industry we have a tendency to look for the latest and greatest tools to help us do our jobs better.In the Agile movement it's particularly rife, after all one of the tenets of agile is the removal... Read more

OK, so you probably don't want to do this for internal projects (CCTray works great for that), but if you've got an open source project and you're using CruiseControl.NET then it might be an idea to let your community know about it.You can't have them all downloading CCTray and pinging away at your server all day,... Read more

Sandcastle will be getting a refresh of the June CTP shortly and will change the name of VSORCAS layout to avoid confusion between the documentation format in VS2008 and the new Sandcastle documentation layout style.Many thanks to the Sandcastle team for listening to feedback and making changes so quickly. Especially since I didn't actually contact them... Read more