I've just downloaded and installed the Windows Live Writer beta from Microsoft. I've gotta say - it's a nice piece of work. It analysed my blog, figured out I've got a blogger account and downloaded all my style sheets, etc so that I edit posts in the actual format they'll be shown on the blog. This... Read more

I'm off to Tech.Ed this week with a few of my team. Should be an interesting time and I'm looking forward to seeing how some of the presentations go (especially in terms of style and content, etc) and trying to figure out what new stuff is useful for our application, and what is just fluff.Follow up... Read more

With the death of NDoc, Microsoft (of all people) has stepped in to fill the gap.Daiv Hayden blogs about it in his postNDoc to Sandcastle - Generate MSDN Style Documentation and Help Files Based on XML Comments in your .NET Code Read more

Finally! I'm very happy to say that enough culture change has occurred in the department (and the recalcitrants are no longer a problem) that I can start moving the team into pair programming and away from solo development.I kicked if off today with one team and their reception to it was very positive and the team... Read more

Day 3. Sunday.It was Fathers day in Canada, which was a bit of a surprise since it's in September in Australia. A big day today.We got up reasonably early, jumped in the car and drove to Surrey where we went to church at Victory Christian Centre, where Jon and Helen Burns are from (we've seen them... Read more

One of the sad things happening in the agile world at the moment is the attempt to commercialise the various methodologies, especially Scrum.I saw a google ad appear on my blog for a company called Sprint IT. They have a bunch of tools and services that supposedly help in the scrum process when, in reality, all... Read more

Last night I started having a look at Fitnesse. For those who don't know what it is, it's a mix of both a Wiki and an Acceptance Testing framework. Fitnesse is not meant to be a unit testing tool like NUnit, nor a functional testing tool like TestComplete. Instead it aims to show that the software... Read more

I've been doing some more interviewing recently as part of an effort to expand my team. One of the interviews I did today was for a developer, and as part of the interview I get the developers to debug some code. The debugging can be a little confusing because the code is written to behave in... Read more

Easy day today. We walked through Stanley Park. A little overcast and very relaxing with plenty of people walking/biking/rollerblading through the area as you can see hereWe ended up at Vancouver Aquarium and spent hours there - it's a great place. We watched the beluga's, sea otters, dolphins (pacific white-sided), and all the other animals they... Read more

Oh No!! NDoc 2.0 has died due to lack of support (read the post).And now I feel kinda guilty as well. I used NDoc to generate the reference guide for the AtomsFramework, and for other non-O/S projects as well.I really feel for Kevin. I know personally how much time I spent getting the AtomsFramework up and... Read more

There was a post on the scrumdevelopment mailing list asking why the agile message was not being picked up as clearly as we wish. Why do people not "get it"?The problem as I see it is to do with the fundamental differences in the principles underlying both waterfall and agile development. It's the difference between management... Read more

Yet another cool Web 2.0 tagging site. The LibraryThing is a site where you can enter your personal collection of books, tag them (as per del.icio.us) and see who else reads similar items, find things they read, etc.Go there today and have a look. P.S. On the left you'll see a little web widget of some... Read more

I've finally sorted through the 4,700 photos we took during the holiday and now I can finally start posting a few select shots and putting a bit of a summary together.Day 1: Travelling from Sydney to Vancouver.The morning started as you would expect with last minute packing and the final shove of things into suitcases. We... Read more

Well, the holiday's over now and today is the first day back in the office.I wasn't sure what to expect after having been away for a month but I was pleasantly surprised and very happy with things. The scrum process continued to work well while I was gone (two sprints completed while I was away) and... Read more

No, I'm not dead - I'm still travelling at the moment (currently in Hope, BC, Canada) and I've finally managed to get a few spare minutes at a hotel's PC (thanks to the Hope Quality Inn) when the kids aren't after attention and when I'm not actually doing anything - which has been rare.The holiday so... Read more

There are a two schools of thought on scrum and how testing fits into the process.There's one school that says because of the short timeframes in scrum, testing should be done by a separate team as a separate sprint. In other words, develop in one sprint and do some "nominal testing" and hand the product over... Read more

I finally has the chance last week to try the new presentation style on an external audience. I gave a talk about authentication and authorisation in enterprise systems and how our software dealt with the issues.The audience was a mix of both techies and business people - people who understand the need for security but to... Read more

You may (or may not) have noticed that recently I changed my site search to use google blog search. I did this because the search results from google itself were not complete.Basically the google site search only searches the blog front page, so searching for something like "travel blogs" on my site would return no results,... Read more

Techcrunch has a nice post about ShareYourOPML at Musings On Share Your OPML. I like the ideas presented, and hope that Share is listening. Read more

In the last week I've given a few presentations on different topics for different purposes.I've given two as part of pre-sales activities and one for internal purposes. For the external presentations both were in conjunction with a business partner and were done using their presentation templates and styles.Needless to say this was the standard bullet points,... Read more