Manicprogrammer

First, I'll repeat the news that's all over: Microsoft has released the ''final'' version of Silverlight 2.0 to the world! This is a major step for .NET developers, because it means we can do really incredible things on the web without massive injections of AJAX or having to learn Flash. For example, take a look at what we've done with Inkubook. ...

Every few months something triggers a series of thoughts in my head about overtime practices, behaviours, and incentives. Every time I think about it, my thoughts come back to a question of the relative incentives in the way our software development system. On many teams, the management group has the authority, while the developers have the ...

Wow, so much I probably should talk about, but I don't even know where to start. Massive amounts of networking, information, realization, and even contribution going on, and I can't unravel it at all right now. I think there's a lot of potential for transforming this into real, meaningful changes in my current environment, but I need to be ...

Wow - it's been over thirty days since my last post. What's changed since then? First, we've put http://inkubook.com into production. I'm very proud of the work I've done and that my team has done on this one. We killed ourselves getting it done, but this is the product of just six months of work of the team. We took a new technology, started ...

Our team has decided to take a step back towards scrum and away from our previous semi-Kanban approach. I think that it's a good plan at this time, although I also suspect that many of the benefits of our earlier approach will continue to show through. Why did we do this? Here's some of my thoughts. They do not at all reflect the thoughts of ...

In the beginning, there is no resume, only an application.Then, there is the resume.Later, the resume becomes an afterthought, used to round out the paperwork.Until, eventually, there is no resume, only trust.

The concepts surrounding batch size have been floating around my head again in recent days. My current assignment is a rather large batch of work with Silverlight 2.0, but it's one that I've been able to subdivide into a number of small batches that rapidly build on each other. Thus, each one of my check ins to my private branch are able to show ...

Effective _now_, we are hiring a single experienced individual into an architect or senior developer role. If you have a desire to work with an incredible team, have great .NET coding skills, and have a desire to see your work become a real product in the marketplace, contact me ASAP. (eric dot willeke at gmail dot com) If you already have ...

or silverlight, or visual studio, or something. Anyway, my work is in the Silverlight.net installation forum under a post titled  ''Silverlight startup error with resources - Summary of fix'' The corrected file is attached here, and I hate wasting a full day (and some of the evening) on things like this.   [EDIT] the full link of ...

Thursday, after the main IndyNDA event, I performed my first public presentation. I've presented to teams, classrooms, and my company before, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to present to an uncontrolled group of my professional peers. It turned out that I only had three people there, but I can't complain since it's very hard ...

Namespace handling is much improved! Yay for easy namespaces! Anybody who has worked with XML in .NET 1.x or 2.0 knows how much of a pain XML namespaces can be in extracting data, yet they fill a very important part of the XML technology. Now, for linq. Let's say you've got a document on disk and you need to pull out the namespace of the root ...

I rarely repost, but this single, fairly short article seems to hit many of the high points in a very condensed format. If I were in a southern church hearing this read i would expect a constant stream of ''Amen'' echoing around me.  Read it. Think about it. Read it again. Then, compare this to what you're ...

What's the difference between these two lines? scriptInit.InnerHtml = string.Format(creationFormat, outerDiv.ClientID, someOtherString); scriptInit.InnerText = string.Format(creationFormat, outerDiv.ClientID, someOtherString); Answer: The first one doesn't do special character escaping, the second one does. With a format string that looks like ...

I'm almost beyond words in a geeky technical sort of way. The ease and simplicity of accomplishing my desires is releasing a sense of joy that I have not felt professionally for quite some time. My desire is made manifest, and I don't have to fight the constraints of the environment to make it happen.   I'll let you know when the honeymoon ...

One of the things I like to do for my personal learning is revisiting some of the articles and papers that had an impact on me to see if they come across differently after months or years. I forget how I got there today I've had Eric Sink's Career Calculus post in a tab all day and have been chatting about it in various directions. The whole ...

Subject: ''Today's scrums will be held in front of the kanban board.'' Yes, it was followed with:  ''That’s the one with all of the post-its.'' But, this is a huge step towards better flow, which has been an issue for months.  

A doctor, of course. And, by extension, what do you call somebody who passes a certification test with the minimum passing score? Certified! I'm glad to be done with it, even though I put off the second part over a year. I'm officially done with the 2005 certifications! Here's what I end up with having passed the two MCSD upgrade tests:MCTS: .NET ...

I don't like to call out individual blame, but sometimes a bit o' shame is what it takes... this query, when run against the (2008 version) version control database in TFS will give you a nice summary and detail pair that can be dropped into excel, or whatever.   select     i.DisplayName Person,    COUNT( ...

Went to ArcReady today, which was supposed to be about software + services, but it turned into a nice discussion of Microformats. As a result, I did more investigation. Larry's right... this is going to be hot (if he's wrong, so am I!) More when I dig in. 

and I'm getting EXCITED about the season. All the activities, family, fun, and giving is just getting ramped up last weekend. The house is decorated, the baby's Christmas dress is ordered, and everything is going well. It also helps quite a bit that we've reached the end of another sprint and managed to finish everything, including a number of ...

Well, Bernardo got a new job, I got a new role. I've been officially promoted to Software Architect here at Authorhouse, effective immediately. This role change led me to think more about what the role of architect really means, and I've come to really think that its meaning is VERY specific to the culture and context of the company in which it's ...

Had my first ever sprint wrap-up meeting. I knew it wouldn't be too bad, but I've been wanting to get some sort of recycle on project phases for a couple different positions now, and was glad to see how one was run, especially since I'm in the middle of it. Four main questions are asked:Did we achieve our objectives?What are we not doing that we ...

It's much easier to tell somebody why they're wrong than it is to tell them how to do it right. Thus, build something quick and dirty (even as a thought exercise), and THEN figure out what's ''right''. Prototypes. Agile. RAD. Models. Alphas. Betas. Every Microsoft product until version 3. Isn't that obvious? duh! Then why do we still do SO ...

Per their job search at http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/default.aspx, Microsoft has 418 job titles (from A-W, I like ''Technologist''). Per my memory, the companies I've directly been employed by since college had ~25, ~60 and ~325 people. Adding those together, MS still wins by 8. 

The business case for TFS is significant, and since we're still in the ''money back'' period for both our other tools, we're headed to TFS. As soon as I can get the domain accounts I'll be installing it... yay! So, that said, what do I need?TFS Power ToolsNotion's Team CI Notion's Team RM and CM (maybe?) Test Driven .NETNUnitWhat else?