The Software Craftsmanship 2010 conference has been announced and is open for registration. The last Software Craftsmanship conference was one of the most useful events I have ever attended, so this years should be well worth attending, even though it has gone from being a free event to having a small charge. As a bonus it is at Bletchley Park, in itself worth a trip. Get in quick spaces are very limited....
I came back form holiday to find a Netgear GS108 switch with all it leds flashing and it passing no data. This is exactly the same symptoms as this post. My fix did not involve the use of a soldering iron as detailed in the post, I just swapped the PSU and it started working fine. I have seen this before, the PSU shows it’s age before the device itself. Good job I have a big box of misc PSU from devices down the years...
SPDisposeCheck is a great tool for SharePoint developers to make sure that they are disposing of resources correctly. The problem is it is a bit slow to run, a problem as this will mean developers will tend not to run it as often as they should. A good solution to the problem is to run it as part of the continuous integration process. There is are posts on how to do this via unit tests and as a MSBuild task, but I wanted to use a TFS 2010 style build....
Do you use the Visual Studio web site? If you do or you don’t Microsoft are interested to find the reasons why via a quick survey.
The BCS has had its EGM today and the results are out. Basically the vote is about 75% in support of the status quo, which I am not surprised by. What I am really pleased to see is that the Trustees withdrew the special resolution the change the number of people to required to call an EGM from 50 people to 2% of the membership. I really do hope that this whole EGM process has been a warning to the Trustee and board that they must be more open, and help promote and continue the dialog that EGM has created....
I have just found out I have been re-awarded as a Visual Studio ALM MVP for the third year (though it was called Team System the first two times). It is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.
[Also see http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/archive/2010/08/13/how-to-edit-a-tfs-2010-build-template-when-it-contains-custom-activities.aspx ] A couple of months ago I wrote and published a custom activity for Team Build 2010 to allow Typemock tests to be run within the build process. Whilst setting up a new build need to use this activity so I though I would see if there was an easier way to use it in a build without all the branch and fuss required for development. This is what I had to do...
Thanks to everyone who attended my session last night at the West Yorkshire BCS on Agile and Lean development process. The projector failing after only a few minutes meant I had to adopt a good agile approach to the session. It was nice that so many people came up afterwards to say they enjoyed the lack of PowerPoint. This got me thinking, as I enjoyed not having it as well. All I really missed was a couple of slides one that showed a Kanban board and another that diagrammatically showed the Scrum process, I got round the lack of both of these by pointing wildly at the blank projector screen and asking people to imagine....
Just a reminder I am speaking at the West Yorkshire BCS meeting this Wednesday on the subject ‘Agile is so old hat all the cool kids are doing lean now’. The meeting starts a 5:45 for refreshments, and 6:30 for my session. The venue is the Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9EN (www.ntileeds.co.uk) Hope to see you there
My fellow UK ALM MVP, Martin Hinshelwood, is running a Professional Scrum Developer course in London at the end of next month. I understand there are still some places left, and some good discounts available. So if you was looking at wanting to implement a Scrum process on TFS it could be well worth a look If you want to know more about the whole PSD programme have a look at the Microsoft site