I've always thought that the "Head First" series of books were great.  Head First Design Patterns in particular in an excellent book and really makes a lot of sense. Well I recently discovered that the authors have a blog called Creating Passionate Users.  It's all about making what you do more focused on the person using your products... Read more

Running agile development teams is great but one of the things that can happen with agile is that information gets into a few peoples heads and often stays there until needed.  If those people leave or too much time elapses before it's recalled then the information is often lost.  Similarly other people new to the team... Read more

If you happen to be an Aussie with Nick Jr. on your Foxtel, then tune in to the Upside Down Show.This is theoretically a show for kids, but how any show that features the Umbilical Brothers could be for kids only, I don't know. It's wierd, it's zany, it's way over the top and it's very,... Read more

I've been on a communications kick recently, looking for ways to help improve my teams communication. The team communicates well currently, but it's all verbal, email or IM communications. How do we retain knowledge, how to we make information searchable, and how do we get the information we need when we need it without flooding each... Read more

The Live Writer beta has been updated (yay!).It now supports the blogger beta, so I guess I'll go download it now and see what the other changes are like.Many thanks go to the writer team for listening to the community :-)   Update: Blogger changed their own beta and caused the Live Writer connect to fail. ... Read more

The Microsoft patterns and practices team has just released a Guidance Explorer. This is an easy way to find and lookup all the various how to's, samples and other goodies that come out of p&p.Best of all though, you can add our own stuff to it (though I'm not quite sure how yet). There's an online... Read more

The internal dev wiki I installed yesterday is starting to take shape. I started by putting a few different documents there and seeing how things go. The team also has full access to the wiki so they can put up whatever they like as well.One of the cool things about MoinMoin is it's inbuilt diff tool.... Read more

The team have been working up some new interfaces for our ASP.NET application over the past few weeks.When given a buy vs build choice I'll typically opt for the buy option - it's so much faster to get something written, and it (theoretically) lets the team focus on delivery of business logic rather than interface trickery,... Read more

I've been looking around for a decent wiki that I can use in the development area and while there are thousands and millions of half baked ideas, I haven't found anything as simple as Moin Moin.Sure it was a bit crappy to install in IIS/W2K3, but most open source is. On the plus side (and this... Read more

Is Your IDE Hot or Not? Coding Horror has a nice little blog post that's sure to kill more than a few hours of productivity this week. Read it at your peril :-) Read more

Yay! Nintendo has provided a release date for the Wii. December 7! And that's the Aussie release date - not far behind the US on Nov 19 or Japan on Dec 2 and well ahead of the PS3 launch in March sometime.Price wise, it comes in at A$400 which is a damn sight cheaper than the... Read more

Scott Guthrie has announced that Atlas is going to be a fully supported product from Microsoft before the end of the year. Best of all it will be supported on ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005"Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap Read more

Very impressive! I posted recently about how you can't use live writer with the blogger beta. Well I got a comment from one of the team indicating it won't be long till they get it all sorted out.I'm surprised and impressed because it means people in the live writer team not only have time to read... Read more

Now that I've had a bit of time to play with the blogger beta I've got to say that the new features are quite cool.A few days ago the blogger team made some changes to allow editing of the html behind the new templates. This meant I could change to the new template but keep pretty... Read more

Ninentdo's Wii is a lot closer to reality now that IBM have reportedly started shipping the chips for the box. I just hope they release the thing worldwide and not just in Japan and the U.S. Read more

I just switched over to the new blogger beta. Talk about easy - a couple of clicks and wait a minute, and it's done.Now it's time to play with some of the new features and see how it looks :-) Read more

Every conference has to open with a Keynote Address otherwise it's not a conference, right. Normally keynote addresses involve product announcements and how wonderful life will be in the brave new world using this, that, and the other. Tech.Ed took a different angle to their keynote and had an anthropologist come and speak. An anthropologist? Yep,... Read more

I've wanted to play with the Vista and Office 2007 betas for a while now, but running it on a virtual PC image is kind of slow so I hadn't really done anything serious until last night. Last night I rigged my laptop to dualboot both Vista and XP and so far so almost good. The... Read more

David Hayden has the scoop. Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 Available - Tabbed Browsing RSS Security AJAXTime to download it and get testing :-) Read more

Well, Tech.Ed 2006 has just concluded and it was really quite good. Better than expected actually. There were a few things that really clicked with me. One was the Guidance Automation Toolkit and software factories in general. From what I'd read in the press and various web sites, I had the impression that a software factory... Read more