ReSharper 2.0 has just been released.If you've not heard of it before, it's a very cool Visual Studio 2005 add-in with heaps of productivity enhancers and refactoring tools. Well worth the price.Also, Red-Gate has recently put out SQLPrompt - a free tool for doing intellisense in SQL query Analyser and SQL 2005 Management Studio. It's also... Read more

You may sometimes find yourself asking what differentiates products that sell from products that don't. And more importantly, if your product is one of the hordes of poor-sellers then what needs to do be done to get it selling better. The answer is pretty simple, nothing new or revolutionary. In fact you probably know the answer... Read more

OPML in case you didn't know, is a list of the RSS feeds you subscribe to (ie the blogs you read).A new site share.opml.org exists for sharing those feeds, much like del.icio.us does for bookmarks. The site shows a number of interesting things, amongst which is the ability to find others who have a similar subscription... Read more

I mainly use powerpoint for pre-sales activities (tender responses, roadshows, etc) and for communicating ideas internally to staff.Now that I've been reading up on different ways to present, I started to refine the technique. Simple statements (one line of 3 or 4 words at most) on each slide, more visual prompts and more communication verbally instead... Read more

I'’ve been using scrum as part of our development process for about 4 months now. During this time things have progressed really well. The team has taken to the new process really well and with the number of staff increasing I now run 4 separate teams across different areas of the product.About the only thing I... Read more

This is completely unrelated to anything technical, but I just noticed that Russell Crowe (yes the actor from Gladiator) is now singing in suburban shopping centres. The one he graced is only about 15 minutes from where I live.I just find it funny/strange that someone who is such a great actor (let's forget his offscreen performances)... Read more

There was a post recently on the scrum development group about how to handle a difficult person in a scrum who was causing the team to fail on delivery. While that particular post is about someone who overestimates it led me to think about difficult people in general.Under traditional methods of managing software development, difficult people... Read more

I finally got around to setting up a del.icio.us account for keeping track of my bookmarks - they're shown on the left.Also, now that the blog is getting a little larger, I've added Google site search to make finding older posts a bit easier.If there's something else you think I should add, let me know. Read more

I've been mulling over presentations and how to communicate messages in general. One of the things I'm trying to come to terms with is how to create a presentation that works well as a live show and also works as a not-live show.By live I'm talking about those presentations where you stand up in front of... Read more

Continuing my kick into improving how I deliver presentations and communicate messages to groups of people I ran across a blog entry at PresentationZen describing the differences between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Jobs is widely regarded as a great presenter and Gates as somewhat mundane and tedious. This helps explain why.P.S. I know which style... Read more

I hate powerpoint presentations. They're typically boring, information crowded and lack any real punch. I also have to use powerpoint as a regular part of my job in order to convey information in either pre-sales presentations or to communicate with the rest of the department or business.I've just stumbled across the Beyond Bullets web site which... Read more

Every 6 months or so I try to spend time with my staff to review their performance over the past 6 months and to spend some time talking about the stuff that doesn't normally get talked about in the day-to-day of the working life. With 15-odd staff (including contractors) it took three days to get through... Read more

I stumbled across a post by Frans Bouma about stored procs and dynamic SQL while looking around at some of the new SQL2005 features.I've always thought Microsoft's design patterns team had it wrong with the Data Access Application Block in the enterprise library and I've been fairly sure of myself. Now, with .NET 2.0 being released... Read more

My sister in law and her husband just flew out of Sydney this morning for a 12 month, round the world, working holiday. In order to keep everyone updated on where they're going they set up a blog site.Most people would have set up a site on Blogger, WordPress, etc and they would have posted their... Read more

Knowledge workers (ie programmers, designers, etc) need to keep mentally fresh and to ensure that they switch off from work when they leave the office. Failure to do so can lead to burn out, an imbalance between the personal life and the career, mentally exhaustion, poor health and more.I found an article on ZDNet along these... Read more

Now that Scrum is implemented properly I'm starting to see some positive results from the change.The sprint review sessions have been very encouraging. The stakeholders like what they are seeing because they can see the product taking measurable steps forward, and are also able to provide feedback into what can happen next. Even though in the... Read more

We all need to keep improving ourselves, our skills and our knowledge. I've just finished reading a few tech books and I thoroughly recommend them.1. Head First Design PatternsThe book is fantastic - I've done a bit of work with design patterns in the past but this book really helped to put them in context, and... Read more

If you've got an evil streak there are some parts of management that are fun.My staff have finally found this blog and have read an entry further below about their technical skills. I'm getting an good deal of enjoymenty over the fact that none of them know if I'm talking about them or not.I wonder if... Read more

Over the last 6 months I've been trying to bring about organizational change in order to improve the product development process, change how product development interacts with the rest of the business and to improve the productivity of my department.As you would expect there were two central ideas to this strategy. Firstly I needed to change... Read more

I have a bunch of technical questions I typically ask candidates. One of which deals with threading and goes like this:The following code is being executed in a highly threaded environment.1. Why does the Debug.Assert statement sometimes fail?2. What can be done to stop this from occurring?public class Warehouse{ private int stockCount = 0; public void... Read more